


no one ever said it would be this hard

by surrexi



Series: closing walls and ticking clocks [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, oops this got away from me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2018-09-13 22:23:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 42,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9144883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surrexi/pseuds/surrexi
Summary: For some people, the soulmate bond means instant happiness and nearly simultaneous happily-ever-afters. Wyatt and Lucy are not those people.(In which Wyatt and Lucy try to figure out how to be soulmates while traveling through time saving the world, getting over a dead wife, and the sudden appearance of a previously-nonexistant fiance.)





	1. death and all his friends

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! Thank you so much for your feedback and enthusiasm about the previous fic in this series, "nobody said it was easy." This is a direct sequel to that fic, so if you haven't read it, click over there first. After much consideration, I decided that instead of adding chapters to the previous fic, I would create a second story as a sequel to the first one, but that instead of giving every episode its own separate story, I'd make each chapter in this second story roughly correspond to each episode in the series. I can't guarantee regular updates, because I have to prep the course I'm teaching next semester over the next couple weeks and then when school starts up again I'll have teaching plus my own classes (grad school). But I'm really enjoying writing this, so hopefully I will not make you wait *too* long between chapters! On the plus side, it looks like they'll be long chapters!
> 
> All my titles so far have come from Coldplay songs. They just seemed to fit? I may keep up the trend or may branch out, lol. As before, "=========" indicates a POV change.

Lucy sits in the back of the car Agent Christopher sent to pick her up and fiddles restlessly with her locket, opening and closing it, checking over and over that Amy’s picture is still there, reassuring herself that her sister _did_ exist, that she’s _not_ crazy. She worries too about her mother, who is almost entirely the same as she had been before she got sick, except as far as this version of her mother is concerned she only has one daughter, and oh, also, doesn’t have cancer. Which is great but also _terrifying_ , because Lucy can’t imagine what the Hindenburg has to do with her mom’s _cancer_. She tries to remember the things her mother had said while Lucy was desperately trying to deny this new reality, wondering if there were any clues in what she said, but the whole of the last half hour is a blur. She’ll think about it later.

She glances at her purse, where her cell phone is, and considers calling or texting Wyatt after all, even though he’s probably on his way to Mason Industries right now, or maybe already there, and she’ll see him soon. She rubs absently at her soul mark and reminds herself that she and Wyatt actually don’t know each other particularly well yet, soulmates or not.

When the car pulls to a stop in front of Mason Industries, she doesn’t wait for the junior agent driving it to get out and open her door. Instead, Lucy pushes it open while grabbing her purse, and rushes towards the building. The surprised security guard waiting there luckily recognizes her and opens the door, letting her pass. Moments later, she catches sight of Rufus and Wyatt, like her still in the same clothes as a few hours ago, talking to each other as they move through the transport area.

“Hey,” she says as she rushes up to them. “What’s changed in your lives?”

Wyatt cocks his head to the side and gives her a look of concern. “What?”

“Since we got back from 1937,” she clarifies. “What’s changed in your lives?” She knows, both from the way her heart is still beating outrageously fast and from the expressions on Wyatt and Rufus’ faces, which are mixes of worry and confusion, that she probably both looks and sounds crazed. She forces herself to take a deep breath. Wyatt’s gaze sharpens on her.

Rufus shrugs. “I just had a date get interrupted by my work. For like the third time this week. So, nothing really.”

Wyatt shakes his head, and his blue eyes are steady on Lucy’s when he asks, in a soothing but gratifyingly serious tone, “Why? What’s wrong?”

“My sister’s gone,” she says, willing herself to stay calm. She focuses on Wyatt’s face.

“Gone,” he repeats. “Gone where?”

“Gone as in _erased from history_ ,” Lucy says, voice rising. She glances from Wyatt to Rufus and back again, feeling her panic growing. “Flynn changed something, or _we_ changed something, at the Hindenburg that changed my _family_.”

Wyatt and Rufus both look stunned, and Wyatt steps closer to Lucy, touches her shoulder briefly.

“My mother isn’t sick anymore,” Lucy continues, still focusing on Wyatt but aware of the others, Mason and Agent Christopher and Jiya, gathering around them. “And my sister was never _born_ ,” she finishes.

“Lucy,” says Agent Christopher calmly, as though speaking to someone standing on the edge of a building’s roof, “we have a dossier on you. There’s nothing there about a sister.”

Lucy hisses in frustration, picks up her locket and fumbles it open. “Look,” she says, holding out the jewelry so everyone can see the photos, though she doesn’t take it off. “This is her,” she says. “This is Amy.”

Mason steps forward, reaching out towards the locket with his intrigued scientist face on. “You wore this on the trip back to 1937?” he asks. He plucks it lightly from her fingers and peers at it closely. “Fascinating,” he murmurs, staring at it. “You brought this from a timeline where your sister existed to one where she doesn’t.”

Lucy doesn’t like how _interested_ he looks, like Lucy has performed some kind of incredibly cool experiment. She grabs the locket angrily away from Mason, glaring. “Shockingly,” she says coldly, “I do not share your excitement. I don’t care what we changed, you have to change it back. _Change it back_ ,” she repeats, voice rising again.

Wyatt puts his hand on her shoulder again, sucks in air like he’s about to say something to her, but Agent Christopher speaks up instead.

“I’m sorry, Lucy, but Flynn is already hours ahead of us. We don’t have time to solve this problem.”

“We have a time machine!” Lucy shouts, furious now. “How can we not have _time_?”

“There’s no telling what kind of damage Flynn is doing right now,” Agent Christopher responds, speaking quickly. “History could change even more in the blink of an eye and our reality could be irrevocably changed. You need to go. Now.”

“Not until we figure out what happened to my sister!”

“Lucy,” Christopher begins, but Wyatt interrupts her.

“Hey,” he says, voice sharp. His hand moves from Lucy’s shoulder to the small of her back. “You dragged her into all this and now she’s lost her sister. Give her a damn minute.”

The angry words hang in the air as Lucy and Wyatt unflinchingly stare at an equally implacable Agent Christopher. “Flynn went back to April 14, 1865.” Lucy feels her stomach sink, slumps her shoulders. “You need to get to wardrobe and then get in the Lifeboat,” Agent Christopher continues. “And you,” she adds, looking directly at Wyatt, “need to eliminate Garcia Flynn.” She stares them both down for a moment. “Are we clear?”

Still glaring, Lucy mutters her agreement. She pulls away from Wyatt and walks toward the wardrobe area.

“Wait,” Wyatt calls out. “What happened on April 14, 1865?”

Lucy looks back at him, grim-faced. “The assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”

=========

Wyatt mulls over Lucy’s news about her sister while he and Rufus are kitted out in Union uniforms. He’d be lying if he claimed he hadn’t hoped, even knowing he’d met his soulmate in meeting Lucy, that when he got home a few hours earlier he’d have found Jessica, or at least signs that she was still alive. But his wall of articles and theories had still been there in his bedroom, and none of the details had changed.

Rufus seems preoccupied and takes an extra moment to talk with Jiya before he heads to the Lifeboat. Wyatt sees Jiya touch her ribcage absently as she watches Rufus leave and files that away to speculate about later. He follows Rufus to the Lifeboat, is making quips about their uniforms when Lucy appears in the doorway. She clambers awkwardly aboard, her skirts hampering her movements. Wyatt reaches out to steady her.

“Whoa,” he says, as she continues to stumble even once her whole body (and skirt) has made it into the Lifeboat. “Just sit,” he says, keeping his voice calm.

“Sorry,” she says breathlessly. She starts to fumble with the straps and buckles of the safety belt and Wyatt sighs.

“Wait, Lucy,” he says, unbuckling himself and leaning forward. “Let me.” His voice is gentle, and Lucy takes a deep breath, dropping her arms to the side to let Wyatt deal with her buckles. He watches her face steadily, doesn’t need to look at the belt to line up the buckles and tighten the straps. She shakes her head slightly.

“I was hoping we’d never have to get in this damn thing again,” she admits softly.

Wyatt tightens her straps and then picks up her arm, the one with his words on it, even though they’re covered now by the sleeves of her dress. He places his palm over where he knows the words are and gently squeezes her arm. “Lucy. I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Thank you,” she says. She puts her free hand on top of his and squeezes gratefully. “And thank you for backing me up earlier. With Agent Christopher, I mean.”

Wyatt holds her gaze for a moment, then nods and sits back to re-fasten his own safety belt. He focuses on the buckles instead of looking Lucy in the eye. “We’re gonna fix it,” he says. “Trust me.” He glances at her briefly, looks back down. “We’re gonna fix everything.”

If Lucy realizes he’s thinking about Jessica, she chooses not to say anything.

The actual traveling through time is just as terrifying and nauseating as the first time, though Wyatt will allow that not having recently had more than one glass of whiskey certainly makes him feel less likely to actually vomit than he had when they arrived in 1937. “Tell me that gets easier,” he grinds out in Rufus’ general direction.

“It doesn’t,” Rufus admits, and Wyatt narrowly resists the urge to groan.

It’s dark out when Rufus opens the Lifeboat door, and Wyatt is surprised to see fireworks in the sky. Lucy and Rufus decide they’re close enough to town and it’s early enough in the night that they can afford to take much-needed naps before making the trek from the Lifeboat to where they can find Flynn.

“Besides,” Wyatt comments, “it’s not like we’ll be much good to history if we’re falling asleep standing up. Flynn could have at least given us the courtesy of, you know, taking a nap before heading back out.”

In the morning, Wyatt needles Lucy about the specificity of her information about what John Wilkes Booth will do today, and is impressed when she reveals she wrote a book on the subject. They leave Rufus outside the theatre to keep an eye out for Flynn and then split up inside the theatre to look for the mailboxes, maybe intercept Booth.

Wyatt assures himself that he is _not_ jealous when Lucy gets an ever-so-slightly star struck look in her eye when she explains that she ran into Robert Todd Lincoln and actually talked to him. And if it is in any way gratifying that Lucy looks to him for support when Rufus starts to try to convince her that they should try to save Lincoln not just despite but _because_ it would change history, it still doesn’t mean he won’t side with Rufus. Lucy’s exasperated sigh is also not in any way endearing, definitely not. (It absolutely is.)

Wyatt’s trying to get Lucy and Rufus to focus on staying quiet and following Booth, hopefully right to Flynn, when suddenly he finds himself in a shootout with Flynn and Booth’s conspirators, who all seem to be wielding conspicuously modern weaponry. Because this is his life now, getting in firefights with historical figures and failing to shoot the one person he’s actually _supposed_ to shoot.

Flynn’s bullet burns as it rips into Wyatt’s side, but he insists it’s nothing to keep Lucy and Rufus focused on getting away from the danger. Once they’re well away from the shooting, he allows himself a stumble and a low curse, which is enough to make his team realize the extent of his injury. Wyatt mutters a list of supplies and tells Rufus to go find them while Lucy helps him down the street. He frowns when Lucy introduces him at the boarding house they find as her brother, though he supposes it does make things easier. The man who escorts them up to a room is too interested in Wyatt’s condition for his comfort, but Lucy brushes him off with a thin excuse and a thick stack of bills and shuts the door in his face.

Wyatt staggers towards the bed, gingerly removing his jacket. “Where the hell is Rufus?” he mutters, lifting the bottom of his shirt up and hissing in pain as the fabric separates from the wound. “We need those supplies.”

“What we need is a real doctor,” Lucy says sharply, worry etched across her face.

Wyatt shakes his head emphatically. “Why, so they can _leech_ me? Come _on_ , Lucy.” He struggles with the shirt for a moment, winces. “Help me get this off,” he pleads.

Lucy helps him pull the shirt over his head. “This is not the circumstances under which I imagined taking off your shirt,” she says distractedly. Wyatt looks up at her in surprise, and her eyes widen comically. “Not that I spent much time thinking about it. I mean we’re soulmates but we just met and there are extenuating circumstances…” Wyatt feels a smile spread across his face as Lucy rambles awkwardly.

“Lucy,” he finally says. Her eyes snap to his. “How do you think I came up with the idea to ask you for your underwire in 1937?”

Lucy’s cheeks redden, and Wyatt shifts his weight, which pulls at his wound. He winces, looks down at it. “This would take fifteen minutes, tops, to patch up if we were back in 2016. Here I’ll just die of sepsis.”

Lucy shakes her head. “Don’t say that,” she whispers, just as the door opens and Rufus rushes into the room. “Did you get the stuff?” Lucy asks immediately.

“Got it,” Rufus says, rushing toward Wyatt as he gingerly lays down on the bed, groaning a little.

“Rufus, you’re up,” Wyatt grits out. “My knife’s in my pocket,” he says, gesturing to the pocket of his pants, out of reach for him since bending to retrieve it would cause too much stress on his wound. “You need to use the lamp to sterilize it,” he adds, pointing to the oil lamp on the bedside table.

Rufus straightens and looks at Wyatt incredulously, glances at Lucy. “Say what now?”

“The bullet’s still in the wound,” Wyatt explains. “It’s just under the skin, not hard to get to, but you gotta get it out.”

“Why me?” Rufus asks, gesturing weakly at Lucy.

“You work with your hands,” Wyatt answers decisively.

“On circuit boards, Wyatt!”

Wyatt grimaces in pain, huffs impatiently. “Then think of me as a circuit board, Rufus, one that will die if you don’t help it. Me.” He sighs. “Whatever.”

Rufus looks over at Lucy again, but she’s already shaking her head.

“Nope. I once fainted trying to help Amy get a sliver out of her finger.”

Wyatt can’t help it; pain or no pain, he smiles a little foolishly at the thought of Lucy, strong and stubborn Lucy, fainting at the mere chance of drawing blood.

=========

Lucy’s not kidding about being bad at tending wounds, so she’s immeasurably grateful when Rufus grabs Wyatt’s knife and starts holding it in the flame of the oil lamp.

“All that firepower Flynn brought,” Wyatt says, and Lucy wonders if he’s so stoic he has no trouble ignoring the pain from being shot or if he’s just using conversation to distract himself from it. “Why do you think he needs it? Lincoln would have been killed anyway, after all.”

Lucy starts to pace. “I don’t think it’s just about Lincoln,” she admits, deciding to voice a concern she’s had since Agent Christopher first told her where—when—Flynn had gone. “Booth assassinating Lincoln, that was just one part of a larger conspiracy. The conspirators’ goal was to kill all four of the most powerful men in the government at the time, all in one fell swoop.” She ticks off the names on her fingers as she says them. “Lincoln, obviously, but also Vice President Johnson; the Secretary of State, Seward; and General Grant.”

Lucy stops pacing and turns back to Wyatt and Rufus. “It would have been devastating, but fortunately for the United States, the other conspirators either failed or just never went through with the plan.”

“Well, I suppose semi-automatic weapons might help change that,” Wyatt muses, tone brittle with pain and frustration.

Lucy nods. “Exactly. What if Flynn is trying to help them succeed?” She tries to keep her inner panic from bleeding into her voice. Her being panicky won’t help Wyatt or Rufus. “If he did, they would cripple the Union. Booth _wanted_ the South to rise again but with only Lincoln dead it didn’t work. What if killing all four men left a big enough power vacuum that the Confederacy _could_ be resurrected?”

Rufus frowns, wrinkles his brow. “I don’t know about you guys, but that sounds terrible to me. For, you know, obvious reasons.”

“Even if that didn’t happen,” Lucy continues, acknowledging Rufus’ interruption with a nod of agreement, “Johnson and Grant are both supposed to become _president_. An America where they don’t would be unrecognizable.”

“Okay,” Rufus says, still holding Wyatt’s knife in the lamp flame. “I vote we stop that. Any suggestions for _how_?”

Lucy shrugs. “One problem at a time. I’m going to go make sure Grant gets on the train he’s supposed to take out of town today. It leaves at six. You,” she says, crossing the short distance to stand next to Wyatt and Rufus, “take care of Wyatt.” She gives Rufus a serious look, then bends down to Wyatt. “We’re going to need you tonight,” she says softly. She brushes her fingers briefly over the words on his wrist, then with a final look at Rufus, she turns to leave.

As she reaches the door, she hears Rufus mutter something about the game Operation, and just before it shuts behind her, she hears Wyatt make a buzzing noise and then chuckle. She smiles slightly and hurries down the hallway.

To her dismay, she arrives at the train station to find the train broken, and Robert Todd Lincoln tells her that he and General Grant will be attending the play with his father after all. She’s already trying to figure out how to adapt to this new wrinkle when she registers that Robert has just asked her to accompany him to the play. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I know I’m being forward, and I apologize for it,” he says with a smile. “But I am certain that your presence would improve the evening a great deal.” He leans forward slightly, lowers his voice. “We may not have said each other’s words,” he says, “but we have met twice in one day. Do you believe people can be fated to meet even without soul marks?”

Lucy blinks at him in astonishment; she was certain that speaking about soul marks with someone who was not your soulmate had been considered highly improper in this period. She thinks fleetingly about the tightness on Wyatt’s face when she’d told him about meeting Robert in the mail room at the theatre, balances it against the advantage it could give them all if she were in Lincoln’s box that evening, particularly now that Grant is to be there as well. She allows herself a small smile.

“I’m at the National,” she says decisively, naming the boarding house where Rufus was currently digging a bullet out of Wyatt’s side.

Robert smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling pleasantly when he does it. “The National,” he repeats. “At seven, then?”

Lucy nods, smiles. Robert goes one way and she goes another, already thinking about how much money she has on her and whether she can get a decent dress for the theatre on such short notice. When she hears Flynn’s voice behind her, his sardonic comment about needing to stop meeting like this, as if she _wants_ to run into him _anywhere_ , she feels her locket heavy under the bodice of her dress and, Amy’s face filling her mind and vision hazing with red, spins around to face Flynn.

As minorly satisfying as it is to call him a son of a bitch to his face, the rest of the encounter is not only unhelpful but also counterproductive, given that it both wastes time and gives her more to worry about with regards to Flynn’s outrageous conviction that someday she’s going to _help_ him. At least he doesn’t bring up the ridiculous journal again.

Lucy stops at a dress shop, heads back to the boarding house. She hopes Rufus has finished whatever field surgery Wyatt decided he needed to talk him through. She thinks about telling them both about Flynn, decides against it, at least for now. Maybe she’ll talk about it just with Wyatt first. Get his take on it. Some soulmates jump straight from being strangers to acting as though they’ve been in love for years, but Lucy knows that neither she nor Wyatt are that kind of person. Still, the soulmate bond comes with a certain amount of instant and implicit trust, no matter who you are. She can’t talk about any of the time travel stuff with her mother, and even if she could talk about it with Amy legally, her sister is still gone. That pretty much leaves her with Wyatt, even if they are still baby-stepping their way through the “getting to know you” phase.

Lucy opens the door to the room they rented for the night and wrestles her new dress box through the doorway.

“You… went shopping?” Wyatt asks incredulously from the bed. She sets the dress box down on the second bed and looks up at him, takes in the not-so-neatly tended to wound on his side.

“Robert Lincoln invited me to a play,” she says, looking away from Wyatt a little awkwardly.

“A play?” Rufus asks, then spins around to stare at Lucy in surprise. “You mean _the_ play?”

Lucy nods. “General Grant will be there.” She sighs. “Flynn sabotaged his train.”

Wyatt struggles to sit up. “You saw Flynn?”

“I, uh, saw him leave the station,” Lucy hedges. She still wants to tell Wyatt about everything, but only Wyatt. She’d rather tell him and decide together whether or not they should read in Rufus. “The point,” she continues before Wyatt can question her further, “is that Grant will be in that balcony tonight and I’ve gotta save him.”

“How do you plan on doing that?” Wyatt asks, and Lucy bristles at his tone.

“I don’t know, I’ll think of something. We make it up as we go, right?”

“I’m pretty sure we can come up with a better plan than _that_ ,” Wyatt says.

Lucy pulls out the guns she managed to also get her hands on between dress shop visits. “These should help with that,” she says, placing them on the second bed as well.

The men stare at her in surprise for a moment, before Rufus speaks up, tone caustic. “I suppose you want us to use those to save everyone _but_ Lincoln?”

“Rufus…” Lucy says, a little helplessly.

“All you have to do is _open your mouth_ to save him,” Rufus says, agitated. “You’re just gonna let Booth shoot him in the head instead?”

“Do you think this is _easy_ for me, Rufus? I _idolized_ Lincoln my whole life. I memorized his speeches when I was a little girl. I _hate_ that I’m going to have to sit in that balcony and let what happens… happen.”

“So don’t let it,” Rufus says, as if it were that simple. “ _Do_ something.”

Lucy shakes her head, won’t look either Rufus or Wyatt in the eye. “We would come back to an entirely different world,” she insists. “And that’s if there was anything left for us to come back to at all. The present isn’t perfect,” she adds, finally looking at Wyatt and Rufus in turn. “But it’s ours. If we want to get home, if we want to get back to our own world, no matter how awful what happens to Lincoln is, we have to let it happen.”

“So all these bad things,” Wyatt says slowly. “They’re just meant to be?”

Lucy shrugs. “I don’t know, Wyatt.”

“What about my wife?” he asks, and Lucy clenches her jaw, feels betrayed somehow by Wyatt bringing her up now. “Would you use the time machine to save her?”

Lucy touches her arm, where Wyatt’s handwriting is scrawled under her sleeve. “You can’t ask me that, Wyatt,” she whispers, trying and failing to keep the hurt entirely out of her voice. “I can’t think about that.”

“Why are you allowed to want your sister back but we can’t want Lincoln or Jessica or anyone else to survive?” Wyatt presses, getting up from the bed to stand close to her, and his eyes are colder than Lucy’s seen them.

“You’re not being fair,” she insists.

“You just lost your sister,” he says, “and you’re gonna sit next to Robert Lincoln and let him lose his father?”

Lucy shakes her head. “It’s not about Robert Lincoln’s father,” she says quietly. “It’s about trying to make sure that no one else’s sister or brother or, God forbid, mother or father ends up dead or nonexistent. My sister didn’t _die_ ,” she reminds them, eyes filling with tears. “As far as everyone but _me_ is concerned, she _never even existed_. Which means any children she might have had someday will never exist, and neither will their children, and so on.” She swipes at her cheeks to clear away the tears that have spilled over. “What if saving Lincoln somehow meant your _wife_ would never be _born_ , Wyatt? Would you still want to do it then?”

Wyatt’s looking at her now the way she imagines she’d been looking at him a moment earlier. Rufus, for his part, seems to sense an undercurrent to Lucy and Wyatt’s conversation that he doesn’t understand, as he is currently studiously avoiding looking at either of them.

Lucy picks up the box with her new dress in it. “I have to change,” she says softly. She heads over to the screen and slips behind it, not bothering to tell the boys not to peek. She knows they won’t. As she wrestles with her ridiculous clothing, alone this time, with no Jiya to help her, she tells Wyatt and Rufus where Seward and Johnson are supposed to be that night, suggests ways they can help protect the men. At one point she curses a few too many times in a row and Wyatt finally asks if she needs help, but she brushes him off, tells him she’s got it.

She tells herself she neither notices nor cares about the way Wyatt’s gaze sharpens and heats when she steps out from behind the screen in her fancier dress and allows him and Rufus to inspect her work. (She both notices and cares, probably more than she should.) She reaches out for the gun she is supposed to tuck in her bag, which Wyatt has been inspecting. He hands it to her, but he loosely grabs her wrist before she can pull away. He uses his free hand to trace over the words on her arm, no longer hidden by sleeves. “Be safe,” he says.

Lucy nods, though both of them know it’s useless to make such promises. “Save Seward,” she says to him. “And you save Johnson,” she adds, looking to Rufus, who is watching her interaction with Wyatt, a speculative look on his face.

“You think about who _you_ save,” Rufus says just before Lucy makes it to the door.

Her shoulders stiffen, but she doesn’t look back.

=========

The door shuts behind Lucy, leaving Wyatt and Rufus sitting in silence. Wyatt thinks about the things Lucy said earlier, when he’d pressed her—probably too much, if he’s honest with himself, and he feels guilty for it—about the whole changing history thing. He understood, in a vague academic sort of sense, that she’d lost her sister because of something that happened when they were in 1937. But the full repercussions of that fact hadn’t really hit him until she asked him if he would still save Lincoln if it meant Jessica might be erased from history too.

“Rufus,” he says, a horrible thought occurring to him, “if something we do, or something Flynn does, changes history in a way that means, say, that Mason Industries never gets founded…” Wyatt pauses, almost afraid to say what he’s thinking out loud. “Would we even be _able_ to go back?”

Rufus shrugs. “I don’t know. I try not to think about the particulars, honestly. It makes me more anxious than I already am.” He looks down at the gun Wyatt assigned him. “Speaking of which,” he says, picking it up. “How many shots can I get out of this thing again?”

Wyatt sighs and explains the gun to Rufus again, reminds himself that jobs involving firearms are not the ones that Rufus signed up for, even when he agreed to be the pilot on the missions chasing Flynn.

It’s not until Rufus is practicing using the sight that he manages to start cracking jokes again, muttering something about the simple task of saving the Vice President of the United States. Wyatt’s pretty sure he hears the words “no probs” in there, and he chuckles.

“You’ll be fine,” he says, hoping to be as reassuring with Rufus as he has other times with Lucy. It’s harder to gauge where to aim between soothing and tough with him, though, and Wyatt wonders if Rufus is harder than average to read or if the soul bond with Lucy just makes her, specifically, easier to connect with. “Relax,” he continues, “and when or if that Atzerodt guy shows his face, point him out to Johnson’s bodyguards. If luck’s on your side, you won’t even need to use your gun.”

“Luck’s not exactly been on our side in the last few days,” Rufus says. “What if I freeze?”

Wyatt shakes his head emphatically. “You won’t.”

Rufus coughs a little, launches into a story about growing up in Chicago and lacking a fight or a flight response, and getting beat up for it. Wyatt listens, but Rufus’ insistence that he won’t stand up doesn’t jive with Wyatt’s impression of him from the last few days.

“Rufus,” he finally says, interrupting the story. “I will admit that I don’t know you that well. Haven’t known you long enough to say that I do. But in the time that we’ve known each other—just days—you’ve helped us break out of jail, held a knife to a Nazi’s throat, and,” he finishes, pointing to his side, “you dug a bullet out of my gut without puking on me.” He smiles confidently. “You won’t freeze.”

“I’m scared,” Rufus admits.

Wyatt nods. “I wouldn’t go into battle with you if you weren’t,” he says simply.

This seems to satisfy Rufus, and the two of them part ways with a handshake at the door.

After everything, Wyatt catches sight of Lucy and Rufus before the two of them see each other. Lucy is speaking to a police officer and Rufus is wandering towards the theatre from the direction of Johnson’s quarters. Wyatt jogs painfully in their direction, and by the time he reaches them they’ve seen each other and Rufus is assuring Lucy that Johnson is safe.

“Seward’s okay,” Wyatt says, and his eyes widen when he spots the blood spatter on Lucy’s skin and huge stain on her dress. “What about…” he says, but Lucy interrupts.

“Grant’s okay too,” she says. She looks down at the ground, won’t look him or Rufus in the eye. “But Lincoln…” The crowd noise escalates, people shouting questions, and Wyatt notices out of the corner of his eye that Robert Lincoln has come out the theatre door. He’s captured Lucy’s attention too, and she his, if the way he’s striding through the crowd is any indication.

She meets him a few feet away from where Rufus and Wyatt are standing, close enough that they can hear when he tells her that his father has died, and when Lucy says she wishes she could have saved him.

Wyatt watches, tensing when she reaches out and grabs Robert’s hand before he walks away. Does he have a right to feel jealous, when he’d thrown his wife in her face just hours earlier? He shakes his head. It’s not like it matters. They aren’t staying here.

Rufus has gone off several yards to speak to a group of black soldiers, so Wyatt and Lucy have a moment to themselves while he finishes. Wyatt doesn’t embrace Lucy, doesn’t feel he has the right, not yet. But he gestures to the blood on her dress. “Any of that yours?” he asks, voice strained with concern.

“No,” she says, subdued. “None of it.”

Wyatt nods. “I’m glad you’re safe. It’s… it matters to me. That you’re safe.” He glances over and sees that Rufus has his back to them, then reaches out and gently brushes his knuckles over her cheek. “You should know that even if I’m not sure I agree with… what you were saying earlier… I understand now.”

Lucy reaches up and grasps his wrist, and her thumb brushes across his words. “Thank you,” she says.

They break apart moments before Rufus turns around and heads back in their direction. By tacit agreement, they return to the Lifeboat. Wyatt and Lucy sit silently in their seats while Rufus checks the information about the location of the Mothership. When he says Flynn’s returned to the present and they’re going to head home, Lucy suddenly tells them that despite everything she’d said earlier, and despite her own intentions, in the end, she’d tried to warn Lincoln, tried to save him.

Wyatt leans forward and takes her hand, rubbing comforting circles on her skin with his thumb. She closes her eyes, trying to hold back tears, and squeezes his hand. They sit in silence for a moment, until Rufus softly tells them to get ready to leave. Wyatt gently arranges the straps and fastens the buckles of Lucy’s seatbelt before efficiently, despite his injury, managing his own.

When they arrive back at Mason Industries, Wyatt staggers out the Lifeboat door and hears Lucy shout for a doctor. He’s whisked away to Medical while Rufus and Lucy handle the debrief. He expects he won’t see either of them again until the next mission, or at least that Lucy will go straight home and call or text him later, if she decides they still ought to have that coffee or dinner they’d spoken about after the last mission.

He’s surprised, and doesn’t hide it, when she shows up at the door to his room in Medical just after the doctor heads out to grab supplies to stitch him up.

“Lucy,” he says, taking in the fact that she’s still wearing her bloodstained dress and that she looks like she’s been crying again. “What are you doing here?”

She shrugs. “Didn’t want you to be alone,” she says, coming closer. She tilts her head to the side and gives a small, self-deprecating smile. “I didn’t want to be alone,” she admits. She sits on a stool next to the examining table. “Jiya looked into my family for me,” she says softly.

“What did she find?” Wyatt asks, tensing up.

“My parents never got married,” she says. “They never even met. My dad married someone who was born because someone on the Hindenburg survived.”

“If your parents never met,” Wyatt says slowly, “then how…”

“Am I still here?” Lucy finishes. “Apparently my father was never my father.”

“You didn’t know.”

Lucy shakes her head as the doctor bustles back into the room carrying a suture kit.

“I need the room,” the doctor says, looking at Lucy sternly.

“She can stay,” Wyatt says quickly, reaching blindly for Lucy’s hand. “I want her to stay.”

The doctor gives them a steady look, then says blandly, “Guess you won’t be calling a cab, then.” She looks back at Lucy. “If you’re bad with stitches, look away. I don’t want to clean up any vomit or have to dress a head wound from you falling over.”

Lucy gulps and nods. She focuses on Wyatt’s face, as if she’s trying to ignore what the doctor is doing. “You were just gonna call a _cab_?”

Wyatt shrugs with the shoulder not on the side of his wound. “I don’t exactly have anyone waiting at home,” he reminds her.

“Yeah, but… Homeland picked me up, Agent Christopher said they’d take me home and I’d have vehicle access to the facility by the next mission. Don’t tell me they’ve got you taking cabs?”

“I actually drove myself here,” he admits, wincing slightly as the doctor stitches him up. “I guess it’s easier to get vehicle access to a secure facility if you’ve already got security clearances through your day job. But the doc said I couldn’t drive in my condition, so I was just gonna call a cab.”

Lucy shakes her head. “No, that’s ridiculous. I can drive you.” She squeezes his hand a little. “Assuming you don’t mind me driving your car, of course.”

Wyatt feels his lips curl into a small smile in spite of his discomfort. “No, I don’t mind. That’d be nice. You don’t have anywhere better to be?”

“No,” she says, then pauses. “I don’t think so.” She tilts her head, and her eyes go unfocused for a moment as she thinks back. “My mom might have mentioned something when I was on my way out the door to come back here last night, but I had no idea what she was talking about, and I honestly don’t have the energy to pretend I know what she’s talking about tonight.” She meets Wyatt’s gaze. “Besides, I have something I need to talk to you about.”

Her eyes have clouded over, and Wyatt can tell, despite the short time he’s known her, that she’s worried about something, worried about telling him something, or both. He opens his mouth to reassure her or ask her what’s wrong, but the doctor interrupts before he can speak.

“You’re all done,” she says briskly, pushing back from the table. She picks up a bottle of what Wyatt assumes are painkillers and holds them out. “Take them according to the instructions on the bottle. Don’t try to tough out the pain.”

“Sure, doc,” Wyatt says, taking the pills from her. He thinks he’ll probably leave the bottle unopened in his medicine cabinet, but the doctor fixes a shrewd look at him and then turns to Lucy.

“You. After you take him home, make sure he takes the meds.” Lucy nods wordlessly, and the doctor turns back to Wyatt. “You’ll heal faster if you take it. And if another mission comes up before you’re field-ready, I’m not afraid to hold you back. Rest up, take the medication, and it won’t be an issue, even if you have to go out tomorrow.”

Wyatt sighs, thinks about having to watch Rufus and Lucy head into the past alone, and nods. “Fine. Can I go now?”

“Yes, Sergeant Logan, you’re free to go.”

Wyatt gingerly hops down from the table, looks down at Lucy’s bloodstained gown. “You’ll want to change into street clothes before we leave,” he says. He brushes awkwardly at his trousers, which are still the Union soldier uniform trousers he’d donned for the mission. “Me too,” he adds wryly.

Lucy grimaces at her dress, nods. “I’ll meet you at wardrobe and we’ll get you home. And talk.”

 =========

There’s still blood on Lucy’s skin when she reaches the room that had been set aside for her to use to change in and out of the wardrobe they provide for each mission. _Abraham Lincoln’s blood_ is still on Lucy’s _skin_.

Shuddering, she strips out of the gown as quickly as she can. There’s no shower in the room. Agent Christopher assured her that now that it’s started to look like this is going to be a long-term project, they’re going to hurry construction on a custom-built changing area that includes showers and lockers to keep their street clothes in, but for now Lucy’s stuck with scrubbing furiously at her skin with paper towels soaked with water run as hot as the sink in the attached bathroom will go. She thinks she’s got most of the blood off, and when she brushes out her hair and puts on her clothes (still the same ones she’d put on _days_ ago, which doesn’t really bear thinking about), she feels mostly like herself again.

By time Lucy makes it out of her temporary changing area and back to wardrobe to give them her gown, Wyatt is already there, chatting idly with the wardrobe supervisor. He doesn’t quite smile when he sees her, but something in his face softens slightly, and Lucy thinks that’s almost as good.

“Better?” he asks, gesturing to her street clothes.

She nods. “Much.” She hands the dress to the waiting wardrobe supervisor. “I had to leave your reproduction dress in 1865,” she says apologetically. “But I brought you an actual period dress back, and the only flaw is that it’s covered in Abraham Lincoln’s blood.”

The supervisor looks like they’re not sure if they should laugh or not and tells Lucy it’s fine and that they will see her for the next mission. Lucy and Wyatt turn in sync to leave, and Lucy whispers wryly, “I really hope Mason Industries isn’t also researching human cloning in addition to time travel.”

Wyatt gives her one of his slow smirks, which in just two missions she’s gone from interpreting as insolent to feeling strangely certain they’re a sign of his appreciation and respect. “Fingers crossed,” he whispers back.

The drive to Wyatt’s apartment is mostly quiet; Wyatt is clearly still in pain and aside from occasional instructions for where to turn, he keeps his thoughts to himself. Lucy rehearses what she wants to say, how she wants to say it. She knows Wyatt well enough already to understand that there’s a good chance he’ll be angry she chose not to tell him about the things Flynn said right away. Maybe if she words things right, he’ll be more likely to understand.

When they reach Wyatt’s place, he leads her gingerly from his car to his front door. As he fumbles with his keys, Lucy surreptitiously checks her phone, which has been vibrating in her purse fairly regularly. There’s several missed calls and unread texts from her mother. She dimly remembers, through a veil of panic and grief over Amy combined with shock and anger that Flynn had taken out the Mothership again so quickly, her mother saying something about a thing happening the next night, which Lucy assumes is now tonight.

She doesn’t want to deal with that right now, though. She can handle one problem at a time, and somehow admitting to her soulmate that she’d kept important information from him when they’re already starting off on shaky ground thanks to his history seems like an easier problem to tackle than whatever it is her mother wanted her for tonight. Besides, she knows as soon as she sees her mother she’s going to _need_ to ask about her father, and she has _no_ idea how that conversation will go. It seems infinitely safer and easier to just double-check that her phone is still on silent and shove it back into her purse.

Wyatt pushes the door open and leads Lucy inside. “It’s not much,” he says, gesturing around the sparsely-decorated apartment with its utilitarian furnishings, “but it’s what I’ve got.”

Lucy nods, wonders what he did with all the trappings of his life with Jessica, so thoroughly absent from this apartment.

He jerks his head toward the couch. “You wanna sit?”

“Sure, thanks.” Lucy follows him into the small living room and watches him fold himself gingerly into the corner of the couch. She stands awkwardly for a short moment, trying to decide how far she should sit from him. She settles on the other corner, leaving the middle third of the couch between them.

“So,” Wyatt says after a few seconds of Lucy nervously staring down at her hands as she fiddles with her nails. “Does what you want to talk to me about, in private, have anything to do with how or why Garcia Flynn knows we’re soulmates, even though we only met hours before running into him in 1937?”

Lucy tries to swallow down her nervousness. “Guess it would’ve been difficult for you not to notice that.”

“He did insist that the reason you were a good hostage to use against me was _because_ _we’re_ _soulmates_ ,” he reminds her, but his tone is soft, not accusing, and Lucy takes comfort in that fact, forging ahead.

“I ran into Flynn the first time at the Hindenburg _landing_ ,” Lucy admits. “I was so angry at him, because how could he be screwing with history the way he was… is. I was yelling at him, and he was almost… surprised. He told me that someday, we’d work together.”

Wyatt raises his eyebrows at this. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, Wyatt, I don’t know what to think. I cannot imagine voluntarily helping him destroy history, not ever. But…”

“But what?” Wyatt prompts when Lucy trails off, his gaze sharpening on her. She doesn’t know if it’s out of concern or anger.

“He had this little notebook, all battered, like it’s been used and read a lot. He said _I_ wrote it— _will_ write it, actually. That it’s a journal I’m going to write and that he just doing what I said he did or should do, I don’t know, and that I talk about working with him. Helping him.”

“Bullshit,” Wyatt says confidently. “You’d never, you just said so yourself.”

“Wyatt, it was my handwriting. And he knew we were soulmates. How would he know? By the time we met, he was already in 1937!”

Wyatt looks nonplussed, doesn’t answer. Lucy’s phone buzzes in her purse, but she ignores it.

“You remember what I said he told me, when I talked to Agent Christopher about it?”

“Something about why they picked you for the team and someone called Rittenhouse?”

“Yeah. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t give me pause,” she admits. “I’m a pretty good teacher,” she says. “My students always enjoy my classes. And it’s true that I’ve gotten several papers published in top journals, got a book published and one in press. But at the stage of my career that I’m at, that output is honestly just average. My department head just told me that my tenure committee is going to deny me tenure, which is basically the kiss of death for my job, at least at this university.” She shrugs helplessly. “There are far more impressive historians in San Francisco than me. So why _did_ they pick me?”

Wyatt shakes his head. “I don’t know, Lucy, but you’re doing a pretty damn good job so far.”

“I lied earlier today,” she says abruptly. “I didn’t just see Flynn leaving the train station.”

“You _talked_ to him? _Again_?” Wyatt finally seems angry, and it’s almost a relief to Lucy. “Why didn’t you tell me? Or Rufus?”

Lucy frowns. “I don’t know. I was—and I’m still—very weirded out by the whole thing, and Flynn was so… _certain_ when he talked about the journal. So sure it came from me and that someday I’m going to be on his side. I didn’t want to admit that to you or Rufus, not when we’re just getting used to each other and to working together, and you were both already upset with me over the whole saving-or-not-saving-Lincoln thing.”

“Lucy…”

She plows ahead, ignoring Wyatt’s interruption. “Flynn told me Rittenhouse isn’t a person. That it’s an organization. What if Rittenhouse is the reason I got the job? That any of us got the job?”

“Then Rittenhouse is the reason we’re getting paid by the federal government to save the world,” Wyatt says.

“According to Flynn, Rittenhouse is the reason he’s doing this at all. He said _they_ killed his family, not him.” She wrings her fingers together nervously. “He didn’t seem crazy, Wyatt. He just seemed determined. I don’t know what we’re getting into here, and… I’m scared. And I didn’t want you and Rufus to know that I’m scared or that I don’t know what to think about the journal, no matter how much I _want_ to believe it’s a fake. And I still don’t want Rufus to know it, but I thought…” She puts her hand on her forearm, where her words are. “You’re my soulmate. I can’t lie to you, even just by omission.”

Wyatt grimaces a little. “Technically, you already did. Twice.” He holds up his hand when she opens her mouth to reply. “I get it,” he adds quickly. “I don’t like it, not because we’re soulmates, or not _just_ because we’re soulmates, but because it could have compromised the mission. I can’t protect you or Rufus if I don’t know as much as possible about what we’re up against.”

“I’m sorry, Wyatt.”

“We’ll have to tell at least Rufus eventually,” he says, and Lucy winces.

“I know, I just… I want to wait until I know more. Until we know more,” she corrects herself. She’s keeping Wyatt in the loop from now on.

“Okay,” Wyatt says.

There’s a slightly awkward silence, in which Lucy reaches for her locket and stares fixedly at it until her phone buzzes in her purse (again), and she looks there instead. In her peripheral vision she can see Wyatt turn to look over at one of the few photos she’s seen so far in his apartment. She hadn’t seen it up close but she assumes it’s Wyatt and Jessica.

“We should also talk about, you know, being soulmates,” she finally says hesitantly, turning away from her persistently buzzing phone and focusing on Wyatt.

Wyatt stares at the picture for another moment, nods, and looks back at Lucy. “Yes,” he says. “We should.”

“I don’t know about you,” Lucy says quickly, “but I’ve never imagined myself as the zero-to-happily-ever-after-in-five-minutes-because-soulmates type. Amy…” There’s a quick hitch in her stream of words at the mention of her sister, but she forges on, gripping the locket tighter. “Amy always said she’d run off with her soulmate as soon as they met, but I always thought it would be better to take it slow. And I think our situation, with Flynn and…” she trails off, glances uneasily at the photo Wyatt had been looking at.

“With my history,” Wyatt supplies.

“Uh, yes. Exactly. Given the variables, I’m not saying I don’t want to… That I’m not… interested. In… you.” Lucy curses internally at her awkwardness. Surely this kind of awkwardness is something that you _should_ get to avoid when you’re with your soulmate, right?

But Wyatt smiles, not one of his smirks but a genuinely soft, if small, smile. “I think we’re on the same wavelength, Lucy.” He sighs, shifts slowly and with obvious discomfort so that he’s closer to the center of the couch and reaches towards Lucy with his left hand, the words on his wrist peeking out from under his shirt sleeve as he stretches. Lucy moves close enough to the center of the couch that she can easily take his hand without him stretching too much.

“Since we’re being honest,” Wyatt begins wryly, “although I don’t think this will come as a surprise to you, I’ll admit that I don’t think I’m ready to start a new relationship.” He glances over his shoulder towards a door she assumes leads to his bedroom, then looks back. “I’m still trying to get justice for Jessica. They never found out who killed her, and I can’t let that stand. And I’d be lying if I said I’m still not trying to think of a way to change things, and I’m sorry if that hurts you.” He squeezes her hand. “I don’t want to hurt you, but…” He shakes his head. “I feel responsible for Jess’ death. I wasn’t there to protect her, and I didn’t have her words even though she had mine, and I…”

Lucy smiles sadly. “I understand,” she says. “Just… remember what happened to my sister, and whatever you try… be careful, okay?”

“I promise,” he says, and there’s an intensity in the tone that makes Lucy believe him instinctively. “And,” he adds, “I promise to help you get your sister back, however I can.”

Lucy feels tears rising in her eyes and fights them back. “Thank you,” she says. She blinks rapidly to clear her eyes and gestures to Wyatt’s side. “I saw you wince, you know. You should take your meds.”

Her phone vibrates yet again, and this time both she and Wyatt glance at her purse. “That’s been happening a lot,” he comments. “And I feel like maybe you’re not just ignoring it on my account?”

Lucy blushes a little. “Like I said before, I think I’m supposed to be somewhere tonight,” she says. “But to be honest I don’t know how to deal with going home. With my sister not being there, and my mother being healthy and full of questions about a life I don’t remember because I didn’t actually live it.” Something tickles the back of her mind, that one of her mother’s questions had been more surprising than the others.

“Tell you what,” Wyatt says, interrupting Lucy’s train of thought. “I’ll take my pills if you’ll check your messages.”

Lucy smiles. “Deal.”

Wyatt shuffles from the couch to his kitchen, where he’d left his medication when they’d come in. Lucy pulls her phone out of her bag and watches as Wyatt shakes out the recommended dose and fills a cup with water. She decides to listen to the voicemails before checking the texts, chooses the most recent one to listen to first. Wyatt takes the pills and chugs the water just as Lucy’s mother’s voice fills her ear. Lucy can tell from the way Wyatt’s gaze on her goes from curious, to mildly concerned, to downright worried that her reaction to what she’s hearing must be extreme. When the message finishes, she drops her hand down to her side, not bothering to listen to any other messages.

“Well,” she says numbly, “I kept thinking I’d forgotten something important that my mom said last night. I was right. And I know what I’m missing tonight.”

“What are you missing? Are you okay?”

Lucy shakes her head emphatically. “No, I’m engaged.” The words fall like a grenade between them. “I’m missing my engagement party.”


	2. get that message home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team tracks Flynn to Las Vegas in 1962, Wyatt makes a long-shot attempt to alter Jessica's fate, and Lucy deals with the fallout of discovering she's engaged to a stranger. (Covers the events of 1x03 - Atomic City)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd have gotten this out at least a couple days sooner, except I got distracted by trying to sort out Wyatt's military service backstory. Suffice to say, the writers Did Not Do the Research. (Further details of this particular rabbit hole in the endnotes, as well as some worldbuilding notes wrt soul marks etc.)
> 
> My semester starts on Tuesday after the MLK holiday. I'm *hoping* to get chapters out during the semester, if for no other reason than writing fic is good for the soul. It will largely depend on the workload of my classes and the amount of grading I have to do for the class I'm teaching. But although I can't promise a specific schedule, I am definitely going to make every effort to update with some degree of regularity!
> 
> As always, "=========" indicates a POV change. Unbetaed, so any mistakes are my own. Chapter title from Coldplay's "A Message."

The night Lucy finds out that in addition to causing her to lose her sister, changing the Hindenburg has also somehow gained her a fiancé, she gets so pale so fast that Wyatt takes her phone away and makes her sit on his couch while he pours her a shot of whiskey. He sits with her, tells her everything’s going to be okay and they’ll figure everything out eventually, and Lucy wonders how any of them can manage to believe that anymore, given what’s happened. Wyatt leaves her phone on the low table in front of the couch, and it continues to buzz periodically with new texts and voicemails. Lucy flinches each time, until Wyatt finally mutters, “Come here,” and pulls her against his uninjured side.

Eventually, she soaks in enough of his warmth and stability that she finds the will to pull away and tell him she’ll leave him to rest and Uber back home. She can tell he really does need the rest when he only gives her one assessing look before letting her go without further reassurances that she’ll be okay.

She’s relieved when she arrives home to discover that all the party guests have apparently left. Her mother’s still up, sitting in the living room, a glass of wine in her hand and a tense expression on her face.

“I suppose it’s for the best you came here instead of going home,” her mother mutters after reading her the riot act for missing her engagement party. “Noah’s actually not as angry as I am but I’m sure he’d prefer a little time before hearing your excuse.”

“I… what?” Lucy asks, bewildered. _I don’t even live in my house anymore?_ She sits down in a chair across from her mother.

“Noah went home about half an hour ago,” Carol says. “The guests left an hour or so before that.”

“Oh,” Lucy says after a moment of charged silence, because it seems like her mother expects Lucy to say _something_.

“Oh?” Carol questions, putting her wine down on the coffee table and getting up to pace. “You miss your own engagement party, that you and I have been planning together for weeks, to which I invited some very important people in the service of _your_ career, and all you have to say is ‘oh’?” She shakes her head, and through the frustration and anger Lucy thinks she can see worry as well. “What’s gotten into you, Lucy?”

Lucy shakes her head helplessly. She doesn’t know what to say. The only reason she even knows that her career choice hasn’t changed is that no one at Homeland or at Mason Industries seemed confused about what she was doing on the team. She has no idea if she works with her mother, she has no idea what her mother thinks Lucy’s been doing for the last several days.

“Work has just been crazy,” Lucy improvises, because to be fair, according to Agent Christopher, time travel is now Lucy’s job for the foreseeable future. She’s got a government stipend to prove it.

Carol huffs impatiently at this. “You get pulled away from a nice night in with Noah with no explanation, and then I get a call from someone claiming to be from the government that you’ll be working with them on some kind of mysterious project. You couldn’t even tell me yourself? I’m not only your boss, I’m your _mother_!”

Lucy grimaces. _That explains that_ , she thinks. “Sorry, Mom. I wasn’t in a position to make the call, and they didn’t want you to expect me to show up to work, I guess. They didn’t exactly ask me before calling you,” she adds. It’s not a lie.

Picking up her wine glass and finishing off what’s left there, Carol sighs. “Why don’t you stay here for the night? I think there’s still some clothes in your old bedroom from when you and Noah stayed here when your air conditioner broke over the summer. We’ll call Noah in the morning and have him come over for breakfast.”

“That sounds good,” Lucy says, mustering a smile. Carol heads toward the kitchen with her wine glass, and Lucy follows. “Mom?” she asks.

“Yes, Lucy?” Carol says absently, rinsing out the glass before setting it down next to the sink to wash later.

“I wanted to ask you something.”

Carol turns to look at Lucy. “Okay.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me about… about my father?”

If Lucy thought Carol looked mad earlier, it was nothing compared to the coldness on her face now. “Are you serious?” she asks, and Lucy thinks she almost sounds as if Lucy has betrayed her. “Why would you bring this up now, after everything that’s already happened today?” She shakes her head and turns away, grabbing a highball glass from the cupboard next to the sink. She pulls a bottle of Scotch down from the top of the fridge and pours herself a generous two fingers. “I asked you not to bring that up again.”

Lucy stares at her mother, has no idea what to do or say. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’ll just go to bed, then.” Before her mother can say anything else, Lucy whirls around and hurries toward where she _hopes_ her bedroom is. Luckily, there is an empty bedroom there. She opens drawers at random and finds that her mother was right about there being clothes, though they aren’t ones Lucy remembers buying. She finds a pair of yoga pants and a loose t-shirt, as well as a pair of underwear, for which she thanks any deity who’s listening.

Lucy takes off her sweater and looks at her arm, takes comfort in the fact that her soul mark hasn’t changed. The continuing presence of Wyatt’s strong scrawl on her right forearm reminds her that she isn’t crazy. She thinks about all the times she and Amy talked about their soul marks, of Amy’s look of concern as the Homeland agent had led Lucy out the door. About Wyatt’s promise that they’d make everything right again.

She folds herself into a bed she doesn’t recognize in a room that’s clearly been redecorated since the last time this timeline’s Lucy had lived in it, because it looks like a generic guest room rather than a room a person lived in. She wonders as she turns out the light how long ago that was.

Lucy falls asleep surprisingly quickly and is woken in the morning by her mother knocking on the door and telling her that Noah’s in the kitchen and breakfast is ready. She shakes herself awake and rifles through the clothes she’d apparently left behind. She finds a pair of jeans and a plain shirt, pulls them on quickly and throws her sweater on top. She runs her fingers through her hair and lets out a relieved sigh when she spots an elastic band sitting on the dresser. She coaxes her hair into a relatively neat ponytail, takes a deep breath, and heads downstairs.

One awkward breakfast later, Lucy finds herself in the passenger seat of Noah’s car, heading towards their apartment, with no idea what it’s going to look like. To his credit, Noah seems to sense that Lucy’s uncomfortable and doesn’t try to push her to talk. He drops her off at the apartment door after she realizes she doesn’t even know which apartment he—they—live in, and even if she did, she doesn’t have keys (“I don’t know why I don’t have my keys, I guess I just left in such a hurry…”) and then, with a kiss of apology on her cheek, Noah heads off to work.

Lucy takes a scathingly hot shower and then spends the day wandering around the apartment trying to imagine the life she might live here. She finds a room that clearly serves as a joint office for her and Noah and spends hours combing through the papers in what appears to be her desk, the books on the shelves, trying to find clues about what else in her life is different.

She wonders why _her_ life has changed so much while Rufus and Wyatt both report that very little has changed. Part of her wants to keep a record of things that change, considering that she and her teammates are the only ones aside from Flynn who will remember all of the changes. But even if she types it, even if all she records are the changes themselves, it still feels perilously close to the journal Flynn claims she’ll eventually write.

She texts Wyatt to make sure he’s recovering, and is somewhat guiltily relieved when he only asks if she’s okay and doesn’t press for details at her vaguely affirmative response.

Eventually, Noah returns home and Lucy endures a painfully uncomfortable dinner in which Noah tries to engage her in conversation but nothing he asks her about or mentions about his own life is recognizable to her as part of _her life_. Eventually, he gets up from the table and, with a quick kiss to the top of her head, tells her that he’ll give her a bit more time to deal with whatever happened at work to upset her. When he asks if she’s ready for bed, she tells him to go on without her.

Somewhat guiltily, she goes to the office, where she’s tucked a go-bag with the clothes she recognizes as her own and a small supply of toiletries under her desk. She stares at the bag and wonders how weird it would be if she asked Wyatt if she could sleep on his couch. They’re soulmates, sure, but they’ve agreed that they’re not ready to explore the romantic side of that. She could go to her mother’s, though she’s sure her mother would _also_ find such an action weird.

She finds a stack of photo albums stacked up next to the desk she assumes is Noah’s and takes them to the living room, adding them to a stack of scrapbooks she’d found by her own desk. She spends some time looking through them and eventually falls asleep on the couch. Around dawn, she wakes with a start from a dream about Lincoln’s assassination. She forces herself to take deep, even breaths, trudges to her office and pulls a change of clothes and her makeup bag out of the duffel she’d left there. In the guest bathroom, she washes her face, changes her clothes, and painstakingly uses her makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes.

At loose ends, wondering why Flynn hasn’t taken out the Mothership again and how Wyatt’s recovery is going, she wanders back to the living room and the photo albums. She’s got one of the photo albums filled with pictures of her and Noah and a scrapbook (clearly put together by her mother, and since _when_ was her mother a scrapbooker?) open when Noah shuffles into the room behind her.

“You didn’t come to bed last night,” he says, voice still thick with sleep.

Lucy turns and is greeted by the sight of Noah in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. “Oh,” she says, desperately trying to cover her surprise but unable to suppress the urge to avert her eyes. Her gaze skitters over the words on her arm as she turns back to the photos in front of her.

“What are you doing?” Noah asks, already sounding more alert. He leans over her shoulder and she stiffens slightly.

“Just… feeling nostalgic,” she says, nodding towards the albums on the table.

“Ah, remember that?” Noah says, and she can hear the smile in his voice without looking at him. “That was a perfect day, wasn’t it?”

Lucy looks down at the pages of photos of her and Noah. “Yeah…” she says, at a loss. She has no memory whatsoever of the day, perfect or not. “The beach was amazing,” she improvises.

She feels Noah shift his head but doesn’t turn to look at him. “And that was the day we got engaged,” he says, and she can hear the incredulous note in his voice.

“Yeah,” she says slowly, “that too.” She has not handled improvising her way through her altered life anywhere near as successfully as she’s handled improvising her way through the past. She’d rather not being doing either, if she’s honest.

“Speaking of,” Noah says, interrupting Lucy’s thoughts. “Guess what I found in the bathroom?”

Lucy has no idea, but judging from his tone it’s another sign of her inability to blend into this timeline. “What?” she asks, finally shifting so she can look at him. He’s even closer than she expected and she tries to lean backwards without being obvious about it.

He reaches in front of her and holds something out. She shifts her focus to it and finds herself looking at a surprisingly large and very sparkly diamond ring. She swallows down a sudden lump in her throat. “Oh,” she says quietly.

“Yeah,” Noah says pointedly. He picks up her left wrist, the back of her arm still facing him, and slides the ring onto her finger. She feels a wave of anxiety spread over her, and the ring feels like an anchor on her hand. “You okay?” he asks.

“Uh, yeah,” she says, resisting the urge to tug her hand away from him. “My mind is just… somewhere else.”

“Well,” he says, planting a kiss on her hand just over the ring, “I think I can help with that.”

Lucy’s discomfort rises as he kisses the back of her hand again, then turns her hand over and kisses her palm, her wrist. The next kiss, she thinks, will fall right on her soul mark, and she is a breath away from yanking her arm out of his grip when he stops.

“What’s this?” he asks, tone inscrutable, expression shuttered as he looks at her soul mark.

She gives him a confused look. “It’s my soul mark,” she says, finally pulling out of his grip.

His eyes widen in surprise. “Excuse me?”

Before he can continue, however, her phone rings. She grabs for it gratefully.

“It’s work,” she says, nearly jumping off the couch in her haste to escape. She makes her way into another room and then answers Agent Christopher’s call. “Hello,” she says. A few minutes later, she’s out the door and in her car (one of the things that hasn’t changed in her life), heading for Mason Industries.

=========

Wyatt has to hand it to the medical team attached to the Mason Industries operation. The meds they gave him for his gunshot wound had been helpful without making him feel fuzzy, and the wound itself has healed surprisingly fast. He decides that if Mason Industries is doing fancy medical research in addition to time travel, he’s okay with it.

Being on call twenty four hours a day for Mason Industries and Homeland means that, as long as he’s a member of the team, he is not supposed to report to his official current assignment, which is a training job at Fort Irwin. Most of Delta Force is based on the East Coast, but Wyatt thinks after Afghanistan _and_ Jessica _and_ Syria, the Army shrinks decided he needed to be as far away from the middle of things as they could get him while still making use of his talents. So he’s been rattling around San Francisco since Syria, training regular forces and scouting for Delta Force recruits among his trainees.

On the plus side, it means he’s back to wearing civvies every day and pretty soon his hair’s gonna get past the tips of his ears and no one’s going to send him to the barber. He’d had a pretty decent beard at one point while he was an active Delta Force operative, and now he’s thinking about growing a new one.

It also gives him more time to investigate Jessica’s murder, which he sees as a plus but he’s pretty sure his Army-appointed shrink would see as a negative.

He’d spent yesterday taking medication every four hours and dozing on the couch while the History Channel droned on about Nazis and aliens in approximately equal measure, sometimes at the same time. Today he’s feeling almost entirely recovered and is spending the morning going over his stash of articles about Jessica’s murder. He’s read them all so often he has each one memorized, but Wyatt can never convince himself he hasn’t missed anything.

He reaches for another article and catches sight of his soul mark when his sleeve rides up a little and reveals part of his wrist. He puts the article down and pushes his sleeve further up in order to see the whole of his mark.

Wyatt doesn’t really know yet how to reconcile his continuing guilt over Jessica’s death and his enduring love for her with the fact that he’s found his soulmate in Lucy Preston. What makes it harder, somewhat perversely, is that the better he gets to know Lucy, the more he can understand why whatever force it is that causes soul marks decided that the two of them should have each other, even if he still can’t understand why that same force threw Jessica into the mix in the way that it did.

Lucy has slipped through Wyatt’s defenses in a way he could never have predicted she would, soulmate or not. From the moment she’d sharply chastised him for calling her “ma’am,” before he’d even seen her face, he’d been captivated by her. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that she’s so damn beautiful.

How, though, _how_ can he allow himself to move on and be happy with anyone, even his soulmate, when he still hasn’t gotten justice for Jessica? How can he be with his soulmate when he still feels guilty over the fact that he’d been Jess’ soulmate but she hadn’t been his? There were plenty of stories about people having two soul marks and it turning out that instead of being in a polyamorous bond, they had one soulmate, lost them, and then had another. Why would the universe tether Jess to him without reciprocating?

Wyatt’s guilty circular thoughts about Jess and Lucy are interrupted by the buzz of his phone behind him. He glances at it and sighs at the sight of Agent Christopher’s name.

When he arrives at Mason Industries, Lucy and Rufus are both already there. Rufus looks like he’s been there for hours, which Wyatt supposes makes sense since Rufus’ actual job does involve Mason Industries, unlike Lucy and Wyatt, who have been yanked from their normal jobs to be on call. Lucy is focused on a computer monitor, and when he squints at the screen he thinks he recognizes the Wikipedia header. He’s smiling wryly at the confirmation that academics use Wikipedia just like the rest of us when Jiya makes a triumphant exclamation and everyone gathers around her chair.

She gives them a 50-mile radius in Nevada on a map dated 1962. Mason is grumbling about the accuracy of Jiya’s finding, but Wyatt quickly assesses that the radius she’s indicated contains only two things. “Well,” he says dryly, “it’s either desert or Vegas, so… Vegas.”

Wyatt’s barely finished talking before Christopher’s asking why Flynn would choose Vegas at the same time as Lucy slides her chair back over to the computer she’d been working on a moment ago. “I’m looking,” she says.

A short time later, Rufus is getting the Lifeboat prepped for departure while Wyatt sits in his chair, waiting to buckle in so that he can do Lucy’s buckles for her when she gets there. He actually kind of likes the suit the wardrobe monkeys put him in for this mission. The 60s weren’t a bad time to wear a suit, he decides.

Lucy appears in the Lifeboat doorway wearing a dress straight out of _Mad Men_ in a color that reminds Wyatt of sunflowers. He can’t quite keep the smile off his face at the sight. She settles into her seat and Wyatt leans forward to adjust her safety belt. He’s brought up short when he spots the giant rock on her left hand, even though he already knows she’d come home from the Hindenburg with a surprise fiancé.

“Should I be concerned?” he asks, the words falling out of his mouth before he has time to actually think about them. He winces, but Lucy looks more confused than surprised.

“What?” she says, meeting his gaze.

“Nice rock,” he says, cultivating a carefully casual tone. He begins adjusting her safety belts, and he wonders if it should worry him that the motions are already becoming routine.

Rufus twists around and glances at her, blinks in surprise when he catches sight of the ring. “That part of the costume?”

Lucy glances down at her hand and grimaces. “No. Apparently, in this timeline, I’m engaged.” She pauses slightly, looks at Wyatt. “His name is Noah.”

“Noah who?” Wyatt asks quietly, not sure why it matters, only knowing that he wants to _know_.

Lucy shakes her head. “I don’t know. We live together, Wyatt, and there are albums full of pictures of vacations we took and this ring was sitting on the bathroom sink and he found it and put it on my finger this morning and _I don’t know who the hell he is_. Including his last name.”

“Well,” Wyatt says, squeezing her fingers, “at least you don’t have to worry about changing _your_ last name, then.”

Lucy huffs out a helpless laugh. “That’s a pretty dim bright side.”

“Nah, the bright side is that we’re going to Vegas,” Rufus says, throwing Lucy a grin over his shoulder before facing the console and beginning the last part of the pre-departure sequence.

Wyatt gives a final tug on her safety belt and leans back into his seat. He trails his fingertips over her words as he pulls away. “Does Noah No-Last-Name think you’re his soulmate?” The words are quiet, hesitant, evidence of a vulnerability where Lucy is concerned that Wyatt wishes he could conceal. He tries not to think about whether or not Rufus is still listening or is preoccupied enough with the Lifeboat launch procedure to not notice what Lucy and Wyatt are saying.

Lucy, for her part, gives him a grim look and shrugs. “I don’t know,” she admits, “but he saw my mark right before Christopher called me, and asked about it like he’d never seen it.”

“So,” Wyatt muses, “in this timeline you either didn’t have a soulmate or…”

“Or Noah was my soulmate and my mark was somewhere else or something else.”

Wyatt finishes adjusting his buckles. “Well, he isn’t now,” he mutters, and doesn’t look Lucy in the eye.

The Lifeboat door clanks shut, and a few stomach-churning moments later, Wyatt staggers out of the ship into the Nevada desert. He manages to not vomit, which he considers a victory. He and Rufus are engaged in what is becoming their usual post-landing banter when they’re interrupted by a distant explosion. In sync, the three of them look up to find themselves staring at a mushroom cloud.

“We’re too late,” Rufus says, slightly shell-shocked.

Wyatt shakes his head, but Lucy answers first. “That’s not Flynn,” she says, and explains about the nearby nuclear test site.

“Who the hell is crazy enough to test nuclear bombs outside Vegas?” Rufus asks incredulously.

“The U.S. Department of Energy,” Lucy says, in the same way one might say “the people who gave Donald Trump a Twitter account.”

Wyatt bites back a grin at her tone and then interjects. “During the ‘50s and ‘60s, they tested over a thousand nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert.” He feels a slight twinge in his side from his bullet wound, though it’s nothing he feels concerned about. “Set ‘em off a couple times a week,” he adds as he gently stretches his abdomen as he and his team begin walking toward the city. He turns and sees Lucy giving him a look of impressed surprise. “What?” he says, affecting a mildly affronted tone. “I know my _military_ history just fine.”

Lucy just shakes her head a tiny bit, but he thinks he catches a hint of warm appreciation in her eyes before she turns to look at the city spread out on the horizon. “Before Vegas was known as Sin City,” she explains, “they called it the Atomic City.”

“Right,” Rufus quips, sounding characteristically unenthused. “Sounds great. Anyone got any sunscreen?”

When they arrive at the hotel where the president is staying, Rufus jokes about making bets on fifty years of baseball games and gently needles Lucy when she rolls her eyes at him. Then while Lucy and Wyatt bicker about the relative importance of protecting the president versus taking out Garcia Flynn, neither of them notice Rufus has wandered away until he returns with uniforms they can use to get into the sold out show.

“How’d you _do_ that?” Wyatt asks, impressed.

“’Cause in ’62,” Rufus answers, “I’m pretty much invisible. It’s my superpower.”

Wyatt does something that’s halfway between a wince and a nod. Sometimes he’s so focused on the mission he’s been given—killing Garcia Flynn—that he forgets how much harder it is on Rufus and Lucy to just exist as themselves in the past. It’s good, he thinks, that neither of them are the type of person to let him forget it permanently. Wyatt’s pulled from his musings by Lucy’s annoyed voice.

“You couldn’t have found me a thong?” she’s saying derisively to Rufus. Wyatt finally takes a longer look at the uniform Rufus had brought Lucy and is suddenly very conscious of his reaction to the mental image of Lucy in the outfit and that he is absolutely incapable of wiping the grin off his face as he stares at her.

“It’s a cigarette girl’s uniform,” Rufus says. He holds up his hands defensively. “Hey, I didn’t invent Vegas.”

Lucy rolls her eyes again and shoves the brief outfit back into Rufus’ hands. “Well go invent me a waitress uniform,” she says.

“Got it,” Rufus says, and heads back towards wherever he got the uniforms from in the first place. By the time Lucy turns to look at Wyatt, he’s managed to bring his grin down from _I am clearly imagining you in that outfit and really enjoying it_ to _I’m just really delighted by you as a person I promise_ , or at least, that’s what he hopes he’s conveying. It certainly _feels_ like a fond smile as opposed to a sexy grin.

The fact that Lucy just gives him an exasperated smile as opposed to glaring at him makes him think that he’s probably succeeded.

A little while later, the three of them are circling the room at the Rat Pack concert (and seriously, what is Wyatt’s life anymore, that he’s wandering around in a weird waiter uniform listening to _Frank Sinatra_ sing live and in person). Though he’s mostly looking for Flynn, he also keeps an eye on Rufus and Lucy. His primary mission might be to eliminate Flynn, but his secondary mission is to protect his team.

Of course, when he scans his gaze past Lucy just in time to see some creep slap her on the ass, it’s difficult for him to chalk up the red haze that clouds his vision momentarily to a protective instinct towards his _team_. He’s already unconsciously taken several long strides in her direction when he watches a woman sitting at a nearby table chastise the man herself and then hand Lucy a folded bill, which, to Wyatt’s amusement, Lucy holds awkwardly for a moment before tucking it into her bustier. _We may have a nuclear test site in our backyard_ , he muses, _but this trip isn’t turning out so bad._

Of course, just a few minutes after the thought passes through Wyatt’s head, he and Lucy catch sight of Flynn coming into the room, dressed in a waiter’s uniform like Wyatt. At first Wyatt is sure Flynn’s going for Kennedy, but then he stops and speaks to the woman who had helped Lucy earlier. Flynn whispers something in the woman’s ear and then pulls her out of the room.

Wyatt chases after them, has a fight with Flynn that makes Wyatt grateful he’d had recovery time since getting shot, and after the dust settles, Flynn’s gotten away again but they did manage to save the girl. Which, now that they’ve got her safely ensconced in one of the hotel’s suites, Wyatt is beginning to think is going to be more trouble than it’s worth. Saving people is much easier, he muses, if they want to be saved.

=========

Lucy herds Wyatt into the other room and leaves him there to brood over what to do next, goes back to talk to Judith. She thinks about all the things she’d love to ask her about if they had unlimited time, wishes she could pick Judith’s brain about being a power player despite being a woman in this time. She fixes a glass of water, gestures with it toward Judith.

“Water?” she asks.

Judith gives her a level, slightly bored look. “Only if you sprinkle it on top of a glass of gin.”

Lucy shrugs, thinks, _fair enough_ , takes a drink herself.

“So,” Judith says conversationally, “you and brooding blue-eyes over there in the next room.” She tilts her head a little, gives Lucy an appraising look. “You sleeping with him?”

“What?” Lucy says, with an involuntary glance over her shoulder, then down to her forearm. “Um, no.”

“Really?” Judith asks with a sharp-eyed look at Lucy’s soul mark. “Because he looks like the type of guy who’d give a girl a soul mark that includes the word ‘ma’am’, and he’s wound pretty tight. Bet he could use a tumble or two.”

Rufus allows the blinds he’d been peeking through to close with a clatter. “I’m just gonna… go…” he says, pointing awkwardly in the direction of the other room before hustling out. Lucy knows she’s blushing, but other than taking a fortifying sip of water, can’t do anything about it. She smiles a little as Rufus passes by her, because he looks even more embarrassed than she feels. She sits down on the coffee table in front of Judith.

“How’d you know about Jack?” Judith asks her. “This Flynn guy, did he tell you?”

Lucy shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter how we know. Your secrets are safe with us, trust me.” She thinks about reaching out to offer comfort, but she’s fairly certain Judith wouldn’t welcome it. “As soon as we find Flynn, you can go back to…”

“To Jack? Go ahead, you can say you think I’m a tramp.”

“No, I don’t,” Lucy says, leaning forward a little and smiling slightly. “I think you’re fascinating.” Judith gives her a disbelieving look. “I mean it,” Lucy insists. “A woman, in this day and age… the life that you live. The people you know, the things you’ve seen…” Lucy shakes her head slowly, can’t quite find the words for what she wants to say.

Judith gives a small, self-deprecating smile. “Honestly, I used to feel like a nobody. But then I met Jack, and the next morning…” she shrugs. “Everything was different.” She looks up and meets Lucy’s gaze. “You ever wake up one day and not recognize your own life?”

The words are like a bomb in Lucy’s head, because _yes, actually, you have no idea_ , and she thinks about her sister being gone and her mother being healthy and her surprise fiancé who was equally surprised about her soul mark for reasons she has yet to ascertain. “Yeah,” Lucy finally says, softly. “A lot lately.”

They talk quietly for a few more minutes, Judith giving Lucy a lot to think about with regards to fate and choices and taking chances. Soon, however, they’re interrupted by Wyatt and Rufus rushing back into the room. Wyatt is a whirlwind, asking questions and announcing a new plan, as if he’s in charge and Lucy and Rufus should just fall in line. Last she checked, they were a _team_. Lucy pulls Wyatt aside, and they argue a bit about the relative risk of using Judith as bait, which Lucy _knows_ is just another proxy argument about the dangers and merits of changing history.

Wyatt storms off with Judith ( _just try and stop me,_ Lucy thinks, _could you_ be _more clichéd, Wyatt?_ ), and Rufus convinces Lucy to go with him to ask about Christy Pitt downstairs. When this leads nowhere, Lucy drags Rufus up towards Judith’s room, only to run into Wyatt, looking slightly worse for the wear and obviously feeling extra jumpy.

Lucy’s not above a heavily-implied _I-told-you-so_ when it’s so eminently clear she’d been right and Wyatt’s plan had been ill-conceived. She doesn’t, however, mean for it to actually _hurt_ Wyatt (annoy him, sure, frustrate him, maybe, but not hurt). So when his face collapses into a mix of frustration and pain and he walks away from her and Rufus without a single word, Lucy mutters a quick suggestion to Rufus for how he might continue researching the elusive Christy Pitt and hurries after Wyatt.

She thinks he’ll figure out she’s trailing him as soon as she even gets close to caught up with him, but if he notices she’s there he’s made no indication of it. She knows that if he really hasn’t noticed her following him down to the hotel lobby, he must be significantly more upset than she thought.

He finally stops at the Western Union desk, and Lucy’s heart sinks like a stone into the pit of her stomach. She knows, before she even gets close enough to hear what he’s saying to the clerk, what he must be doing. And for all her speeches about being careful to protect the timeline, for all her very real and, she would certainly argue, very valid concerns about the possibility of what happened to her sister happening to anyone else, she can’t fault him for wanting to try. Besides, of all the things he could try, having a telegram sent fifty years in the future is probably the least obtrusive and least likely to do damage.

She wonders if Wyatt knows that Western Union stopped (will stop?) sending telegrams in 2006. She wonders if she should even bring it up.

She gets close enough behind Wyatt that he still hasn’t noticed her approach but she can hear what he’s saying, tries not to feel guilty when she does.

“Go home with Wyatt,” he dictates, voice breaking a little. “Even if he’s being an ass about the thing you always fight about. You don’t have to talk, just let him take you home. And… know he loves you, with or without a soul mark. More than you’ll ever know.”

Lucy doesn’t know how to feel, doesn’t know how to sort out the empathy and pity and jealousy into something reasonable, that a reasonable human being would feel in this situation. (As if anyone had been or ever would be in this situation again.) She’s still standing there, frozen, trying to figure out how to make her face look, when Wyatt turns around.

He stares at her for a charged moment, neither of them quite knowing what to say or how to move. Finally, he breaks the spell, giving a shrug that’s clearly meant to imply everything’s fine but is really just painfully performative. “Worked in _Back to the Future II_ ,” he says. He strides forward, brushes past her. She turns to watch him go, lets him get a few feet away before calling his name. He turns back, shakes his head. “Look, I know what you’re gonna say.”

“No,” Lucy says firmly. “You don’t.” She steps closer to him, keeps some space between them but gets close enough that the chasm between them doesn’t feel so wide. “I understand,” she says. “I would do… _anything_ to get my sister back.”

Wyatt looks gratified and surprised, then drops his gaze briefly down to her arm, his handwriting standing out in stark black against her pale skin. She crosses her arms self-consciously, holding the words against her body. She’s not sure if she’s hiding them or protecting them, or a little of both. “I understand,” she repeats, though it’s quieter, and there’s more pain in the tone than she would have admitted or even expected.

“I’m sorry,” Wyatt says then. “About earlier. I know you’re just doing your job, protecting history. I know you don’t want anyone else to lose someone the way you lost your sister.” He shakes his head, like he’s trying and failing to find the words for what he wants to say. “Ever since Jess and I met, and she had my words but I didn’t have hers… I’ve had trouble with the idea of fate. Of things being _meant to be_. Because how could I be meant to be her soulmate when she wasn’t meant to be mine? How could that be fair to either of us?” He looks at her pleadingly, and she wonders if he thinks she won’t understand after all. “And when she died… the way it happened… it’s all just chance, Lucy. Dumb luck and random chance.”

Dimly, Lucy thinks she could write a new definition of “cognitive dissonance” based entirely on the depth to which she understands and empathizes with Wyatt’s pain combined with the degree to which it hurts her to hear her _soulmate_ chalk everything up to random chance.

She’s saved from having to formulate a reply, as Rufus chooses that moment to run up to them babbling excitedly. He’s tripping over his words, apologizing for not realizing something sooner, but he’s not actually telling them anything.

“Slow down,” Lucy says soothingly, though it seems to have no effect.

Eventually, Wyatt is able to get Rufus to refocus enough to tell them that _apparently_ Flynn is after the plutonium core of an atomic bomb, and Lucy decides she’s never, ever going to Las Vegas ever again, because clearly only bad things happen here. After that, the night is a blur of Rufus effortlessly impersonating a valet in order to steal a car (“See? Invisible.”), the worst game of chicken she’s ever been a part of (“Because if he doesn’t, we’ll all blow up.”), and an actual gunfight-retrieval-rescue mission (“You _cannot_ do this alone!”).

“What happens to her?” Wyatt asks her quietly, when Flynn and Anthony have driven away and there’s a car picking up Judith.

Lucy kicks at the dirt. “Eventually her secrets come out. She’s vilified by the public and finally dies of cancer.” She doesn’t have the energy to sugarcoat Judith’s story. Can’t find the will to deliver it in anything but a flat tone. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Wyatt look at her with concern.

“Damn,” Rufus says from behind her. “She seemed like she had it all together.”

“Nobody’s got it all together,” Wyatt says decisively.

Wyatt’s words prove distressingly prophetic a moment later, when Rufus realizes that at some point, Anthony switched out the suitcases so that Rufus ended up getting an empty case while Anthony and Flynn escaped with the actual plutonium core.

“Well,” Wyatt says, “debrief’s gonna be fun.”

=========

The team tumbles out of the Lifeboat when they return to 2016, and Wyatt takes a moment to be wildly jealous of Rufus and Lucy’s ability to regain equilibrium almost immediately post-jump. Lucy’s already launched into a series of questions about JFK, Judith Campbell, and the nuclear testing program outside Vegas, trying to ascertain if anything has changed.

Christopher answers enough questions that Lucy pauses to take a breath, and then waves off anything further Lucy might ask. “Did you find Flynn?” she asks, zeroing in on Wyatt.

He pushes to his feet. “Yeah,” he says bitterly. “We found him.”

“And?” Christopher prods when he doesn’t elaborate. “What did he want in Las Vegas?”

Wyatt, Lucy, and Rufus glance at each other uneasily. “You’re gonna want to sit down for this,” Rufus says.

Agent Christopher’s eyebrows lift to impressive heights, but she leads them to the main conference room above the Launchpad without further comment.

Lucy launches into what Wyatt considers an impressive spin on the situation—she doesn’t ignore the negatives, but focuses on how they protected history and kept the timeline intact for once, and he thinks if it weren’t for the fact that the mission’s failures included _letting Flynn get away with a nuclear weapon_ , Lucy might have managed to deflect the heat for losing him at all.

As it is, though, Agent Christopher’s incredulous “You can’t be _serious_ ” makes it clear that Lucy can only spin it so far.

“We _saved_ Judith Campbell,” Lucy reiterates. “We kept history the same.”

Christopher shakes her head. “But Garcia Flynn is not only still alive, he got away with an _atomic bomb_.” She’s looking directly at Wyatt now, the censure clear.

“The situation was chaotic,” he says, tonelessly.

“On the upside,” Rufus says in a falsely cheerful tone that makes Wyatt wince, “we’re finally starting to gel as a team.” Wyatt gives Rufus an incredulous look. “Just saying,” Rufus adds defensively.

“And you,” Agent Christopher says, focusing in on Rufus, “believe that Anthony is working _with_ Flynn?”

“I think it’s _complicated_ ,” Rufus says carefully, clearly still unwilling to admit that his friend may have betrayed him. “There’s gotta be an explanation as to _why_ ,” he insists. “Anthony’s not the type of guy who would do something like this.”

“They never are on the surface,” Christopher says, shaking her head. “Well,” she adds, “that makes one part of our job easier.” She focuses again on Wyatt, and he knows what’s coming, knows Rufus definitely won’t like it and Lucy probably won’t be entirely comfortable with it either. “We don’t need to _rescue_ Anthony Bruhl anymore. We just need to eliminate him. It would leave Flynn without anyone to pilot the Mothership.”

Wyatt keeps his face neutral. “That crossed my mind,” he says tightly.

Christopher’s gaze sharpens on him. “In this gun battle… did you ever get a shot at Anthony?”

Wyatt’s been trained to report fully and honestly to his superiors after every mission. To accept whatever consequences that might entail. Wyatt has also been taught how to use the truth to present the story in the most favorable light. How to protect his team no matter what. Which is why after only the slightest of hesitations, he looks Agent Christopher straight in the eye and says, very calmly, “Never a clean shot.”

“Next time make sure you do,” she says sharply, before turning and bustling out of the room.

There’s a heavy silence between Wyatt and his teammates in the wake of Agent Christopher’s departure. Rufus starts to walk toward the door, but before he leaves the room, he turns around and gives Wyatt a grateful look.

“Thanks,” he says, “for not throwing me under the bus just now.”

“You’re part of my team,” Wyatt says, doesn’t elaborate because as far as he’s concerned there’s no need to. Rufus nods like he gets it.

“Anthony’s a good guy,” he adds in that slightly awkward, slightly tentative way he has when he’s standing up for himself. “I know you don’t know him, either of you,” he says, glancing at Lucy to include her. “But I do. There has to be something _else_ going on here, and I am not gonna let my friend _die_ without finding out the truth.”

Wyatt shares a loaded glance with Lucy, can tell she’s thinking about the same thing he is—the journal Flynn has, insists is Lucy’s, insists explains everything.

“For the record,” Rufus adds, “I’d do the same for both of you.”

Wyatt offers a small smile. “Thanks,” he says quietly. Lucy echoes him, squeezes Rufus’ shoulder briefly. Wyatt sits down heavily at the conference table and reaches out for a laptop computer sitting nearby. Lucy looks at him sharply, like she already knows what he wants to do.

“Aren’t you at all curious about why this is all happening?” Rufus asks suddenly.

“I don’t get trained in why,” Wyatt says. “Just the who, what, when, and where.” Lucy shrugs, wraps her arms around her waist like she’s trying to hug herself. Wyatt is pretty sure the why of everything is one of the only things Lucy’s thinking about lately.

Rufus huffs impatiently. “But without the why… how can we be sure we’re on the right side of things?”

Wyatt steals a glance at Lucy, who’s suddenly unable to look either him or Rufus in the eye. He shakes his head slowly. “We make it up as we go,” he says, echoing the phrase that’s quickly becoming the team motto.

Rufus looks dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the answer, but mutters something about changing his clothes before striding out of the conference room. Lucy lets out a long breath, like she’d been holding it to keep from saying something to Rufus about the journal or Flynn’s ramblings about Rittenhouse. She pulls out the chair next to Wyatt and sits down.

“We have to tell him,” he says quietly, urgently.

“Not here,” Lucy whispers. “Not now.”

“But soon,” he insists. She nods. He opens the laptop in front of him, logs in, opens a browser window. His fingers hover over the keyboard, the cursor blinking at him from the search box.

“Do you want me to look for you?” Lucy asks gently.

Wyatt shakes his head, types Jessica’s name in, hits enter. His stomach sinks to the floor as the results list instantly populates with familiar headlines. He clicks on one of the ones from when her body was found, skims the details. They’re all the same. He stares blindly at the screen until Lucy puts a tentative hand on his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, Wyatt,” she says, and Wyatt imagines it’s not easy for her. They’re… whatever they are, whatever they’re going to be, and she’s sorry that he hadn’t managed to change history so his _wife_ isn’t dead.

“It was a long shot,” he makes himself say. “I’m pretty sure Western Union stopped sending telegrams before 2012 anyway,” he mutters.

“You had to try,” Lucy says. “I told you, I understand.”

Wyatt shuts the laptop, turns his chair to face Lucy’s. She turns toward him, and their knees brush. Wyatt tells himself it’s not electric (he’s surprised there weren’t actual sparks). He looks down at her hands, resting now in her lap, sees the diamond sitting on her left hand. Slowly, enough so she can pull away any time, he reaches out and takes her hand, brushes his thumb over the diamond. Lucy’s only reaction is a sharp inhale, too small to be called a gasp but too fast to just be breathing. He turns her hand over so that her forearm is facing up, studies the words there.

“What’re you gonna tell Noah?” he asks.

Lucy takes a deep breath. “I need to figure out why he reacted the way he did to my soul mark. And then…” She shrugs. “I have a go-bag,” she admits. “I packed it yesterday while he was at work. I can’t stay there, in that apartment I don’t recognize with a fiancé I don’t know.” She grips Wyatt’s hand and he laces his fingers through hers almost unconsciously, his instinct to comfort her (to comfort _his soulmate_ ) stronger than all the _stuff_ , all the complications that divide them. “I’m hoping my mom will let me stay with her,” she finishes. “I’ll tell her I need time to think about my life, or something, I don’t know. If she’s anything like the mom I knew in our real timeline… she’ll be confused, and concerned, and probably think I’m being melodramatic, but she’ll let me stay.”

Wyatt squeezes her hand lightly. “If she doesn’t, you call me. I don’t have a spare bed, but the couch pulls out.”

Lucy gives him a weak smile. “I really am sorry,” she says. “About the telegram. Despite… everything.”

“I know, Lucy.” He brushes his knuckles over her cheek, ever so lightly, drops his hand back to his lap. “It means a lot that you are. I know it must be difficult for you and I’m not making it easier.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she says, and her voice is soft but steely. “We’ll make it all work out.”

Wyatt nods. He doesn’t really know what to say in response, doesn’t know that there’s anything he can say that he hasn’t already. He gives her fingers one last gentle squeeze and releases them. “I’m gonna go get out of these clothes,” he says. “Do you need a ride, or do you have your car here?” he asks.

She smiles, shakes her head. “No, I’m good. But thanks.”

=========

Lucy uses the GPS on her phone to get back to Noah’s apartment, picks one of the visitor spaces because she can’t remember which of the reserved spots her car had been parked in when she left for Mason Industries for the Vegas mission.

She lets herself into the apartment and goes straight for the office. She pulls the duffel she’d packed the day before out from under her desk and returns to the dining room. She puts the duffel on the table and sits down next to it. A moment later, Noah walks in.

“I thought I heard you come in,” he says. His gaze tracks from Lucy to her bag and back again. “Going somewhere?” he asks, voice neutral.

“We need to talk,” Lucy says.

Noah’s gaze is flinty, cold in a way Lucy thinks would be hurtful if she had any memories of him at all. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the soul mark you swore you didn’t have but apparently do, would it?”

Lucy feels her eyes widen. “I didn’t…”

“You did, Lucy!” Noah is agitated now, pacing back and forth at the other end of the table. “We met and I said it was too bad I didn’t have a soul mark, because if it were up to me I’d have picked you. And do you remember what you said?”

Lucy shakes her head helplessly. How can she possibly explain any of this to Noah? She thinks of Flynn and his stupid journal, and his stupid vendetta, and she wishes Flynn were here right now to see the damage he’s done. (Though she wonders if he would care at all.)

Noah gives her a disbelieving look. “You told me it was all right, you’d never had a mark and _preferred_ to make your own destiny. Have you been lying all this time? Covering up the mark every day?”

“No,” Lucy says, though God knows she can’t come up with a better explanation. Everyone knows that you’re either born with a mark or you aren’t, and the only thing that changes about them is that they slowly fade if and when your soulmate dies. No one just gets a new mark in their mid-thirties. “I wouldn’t lie about something like this.”

“What, then? You get dragged off to a new job by some shady government official, and when you get back… you’re like a whole different person, Lucy! With a soul mark you never had before!”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Lucy says. She shrugs. “I don’t remember talking to you about my soul mark. I don’t remember not having it.”

“What you’re saying is impossible, Lucy.” Noah strides across the room, pulls out a chair and sits down so he’s level with her. “I’m worried about you.” He reaches out, takes her hands. “You’re not yourself, and this new job of yours…”

She gently pulls her hands out of his grasp. “My work has changed drastically in the last week,” Lucy admits, “and things are… presently unsettled. But…” She thinks of Judith, smiles sadly. “I met a woman today, who had this exciting life with exciting people. And she seemed like she had it all together, had it all figured out.”

“Did she?” Noah asks quietly.

“No,” Lucy says, “the truth was that she didn’t have it all together at all, not at the end of the day. And I realized that no one, not _anyone_ , has it all together.” She sits up straighter. “Least of all me. I understand that you’re concerned. But I have to get my head straight, and I can’t do that here.”

“With me,” Noah finishes for her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I wish I could explain to you what’s going on, but I just… can’t.”

He looks down at her arm, where her soul mark is currently covered by her sweater. “Did you meet them?” he asks. Lucy says nothing, but this is answer enough for Noah. “Maybe you have some kind of evolved version that doesn’t appear until you meet your person,” he mutters. He gets up from the chair, paces some again. “Doesn’t explain your memory problems. You should see a doctor,” he says. “I know someone, a neurologist that actually has done soul mark research too. Something about neurochemical reactions to soulmates, I don’t know. Maybe she could…”

“Noah,” Lucy says, gently but firmly. “I appreciate your concern, I do. But I’m fine. I can’t explain it to you, but I’m fine.”

“I love you,” Noah says, voice low and pained. “And you love me. Isn’t that enough?”

Lucy feels terrible, doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” she settles on. “I’m going to go stay with my mom.” She gets up, picks up her duffel bag. “If I could be who you need me to be,” she says softly, “I would.”

“You are,” he says.

She shakes her head. “Not anymore.”

She starts to walk out of the room, but turns when Noah calls out her name. She gives him an inquisitive look.

“When you feel like yourself again… when you’re ready to come home… I’ll be waiting.”

Lucy doesn’t know how to respond to that, to this devotion from a complete stranger. She says nothing, and leaves the apartment. She feels terrible, but also lighter. One less person to pretend with, one less person to lie to. For now, anyway. He mother had been confused when Lucy had called her while driving to Noah’s, but assured her that she was welcome to stay “for a few days” to sort her head out.

Lucy hopes that continues to be the case when it turns out she needs a lot longer than a few days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re Wyatt's service record: I should have known as soon as I noticed the articles about Jessica's death mention Wyatt being Delta Force that proper research had not been done. They're so secret that operatives don't even admit to being in the *military*, let alone *Delta Force*. At any rate, for the purposes of this fic I'm pretending the articles don't mention Wyatt being Delta Force, assuming that at some unspecified time prior to Jess' murder he served with distinction as a Delta Force operative in Afghanistan, somehow ended up in San Diego in 2012 despite there not being an Army facility there, at which point Jess was killed, and then participated in a *very* early on-the-ground Delta Force engagement in Syria (officially there have been very few, incidentally). My excuse for him ending up in San Francisco, where there is very limited Army presence, is basically "the Army is concerned he's been through too much and now he's rusticating because they don't want to officially retire him." Sometimes it is very frustrating watching military characters on TV when you grew up in a military family, lol. (Me @ my TV, constantly: "THAT'S NOT HOW THIS WORKS!")
> 
> Re Noah: Noah is definitely confused about what's happened and concerned about Lucy. So, although subsequent appearances of Noah in this fic will be more different from the show than other aspects of the plot/character development, I will most likely still bring him back into the narrative at some point.
> 
> Re my version of how soul marks work: Assume that a relatively small but not entirely insignificant percentage of the population is not born with a soul mark, but no one knows why and it does not corrolate directly with the asexual/aromantic population. As mentioned in the chapter, sometimes people with more than one mark have polyamorous bonds while other times they have two soulmates who they meet/have a relationship with at different times. There are also platonic bonds, which sometimes involve asexual/aromantic people and sometimes simply exist between close friends regardless of orientation.


	3. it feels so much lighter since i met you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy and Wyatt continue to negotiate what it means to be soulmates while traveling in time, saving the world from Nazis, and, oh yes, meeting the real James Bond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may recall that in this episode, Lucy is experiencing flashbacks/anxiety attacks. I don't have PTSD but I do have anxiety and occasionally experience anxiety attacks, and I used my own experiences to inform how I wrote Lucy's thought patterns/inner monologue during the attacks. There is only one extended occurrance of this, and all of the moments where it happens occur in the same place in this chapter as they do in the episode it's based on (1x04 - Party at Castle Valar). So, if you are concerned that reading something like that might be triggering, please take care when you are getting to those points. If you think you might need to skip the extended one, it begins with the text "She can almost taste how much she hates putting on the uniform" and is over at the line "Hey." (which is when Wyatt enters the room).
> 
> Chapter title is from Coldplay's "Green Eyes," and I'm still not sure why I've decided to fixate on Coldplay titles, lol.

Wyatt is actually sleeping (as opposed to combing through his research about Jessica’s death yet again, or sitting on his couch brooding about Lucy) when his phone rings. He startles out of sleep, his hand jerking toward his bedside table. His fingers are curling around the handle of the drawer where he keeps his gun before his mind catches up to his body and he grabs the still-ringing phone instead.

“Logan,” he says, voice rough with sleep.

“Jiya found Flynn,” Agent Christopher says in lieu of a greeting, her tone clipped. “Get here as fast as you can, we’re putting together a team to go after him and I want you on point.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wyatt’s already on his feet when Christopher hangs up on him. He tosses his phone down on the bed and digs in his drawers for his black tactical pants and a black t-shirt. He’s out the door in five minutes, and makes such good time from his apartment to Mason Industries that he imagines Jiya turning traffic lights green for him the whole way.

He’s hustled into a tactical van by Agent Christopher, and inside there are other agents, one of whom pushes a bundle of gear into Wyatt’s hands.

“Suit up,” the agent says succinctly. Wyatt nods and mechanically puts on the bulletproof vest and assorted other tactical gear, leaving the helmet in his lap to put on last. The ride to wherever Flynn and the Mothership are is tense, Agent Christopher alternating between checking her watch and tapping out swift text messages, everyone else in what Wyatt recognizes as a pre-mission quiet mode. He grimaces, the feeling of trying to find his center despite perfectly reasonable nerves all too familiar. The missions in the Lifeboat are nerve-wracking and stressful, but it’s not the same as this hushed, nervy anticipation.

He has not missed feeling like this, if he’s being honest.

They’ve no sooner burst in the door of the warehouse where Flynn had landed than the Mothership winks out of existence with a gust of wind and the faint scent of ozone.

Wyatt shakes his head, dejected. Agent Christopher orders the surrounding agents to search, collect, and catalog everything left behind, though Wyatt has his doubts that Flynn would keep anything important on computers he’d know he might have to leave behind in a hurry.

He knows it’s the next thing to impossible that Flynn might have left behind the journal Lucy says he claims to have, but Wyatt looks around for it anyway. If it is there, he wants to spot it before anyone else. Lucy doesn’t need the kind of scrutiny it would inspire, and if Christopher decided to ground her over it Wyatt doesn’t want to think about trying to do the job with some other historian.

As Wyatt helps the other agents go over the scene, he notices Agent Christopher deep in conversation with her tablet—or rather, with Connor Mason via video chat on her tablet. The next time he finishes a conversation with one of the Homeland techs, he looks up to see Christopher striding towards him. She holds out the tablet.

“Take five, Sergeant Logan. Mr. Carlin should call in any moment and I’ll need you to update him while I talk to my agents.”

Wyatt nods. “Ma’am,” he says. He watches as Agent Christopher confers with the suits who showed up to supervise the investigation once the dust had settled until the tablet in his hands buzzes. He taps the screen to connect the video call.

“Hey Rufus,” he says, casually. “How’s your night going? Anything exciting?”

Rufus rolls his eyes, but smiles a little. “Eh,” he says, “pretty quiet. Yours?”

Wyatt shrugs. “Just your average weeknight.” His smile drops and face turns serious. “Agent Christopher said to give you an update, but there’s not much to tell at the moment, to be honest.” He glances over his shoulder, looks back to the tablet. “Techs are going over everything now. Flynn left a lot of stuff behind, but there’s no telling how useful it’ll actually be.”

“Any sign of the nuke?” Rufus asks, with only the faintest tinge of hope.

“No,” Wyatt says, and Rufus seems to slump a little, discouragement evident on his face.

Agent Christopher materializes at Wyatt’s shoulder and peers at Rufus on the tablet. “Do we have a lock on where he went yet?” she asks.

Rufus grimaces, and Wyatt braces himself for the bad news which is clearly coming. “December 9, 1944,” Rufus says grimly. “Germany.” He pauses for a moment, looks like he’s weighing his words. “The U.S. didn’t have a working A-bomb until 1945,” he adds. Wyatt doesn’t like where this is going any more than Rufus seems to. “If Flynn gives one to the Nazis before the war is over…” Rufus trails off.

“Then the war is over,” Wyatt finishes for him.

Christopher sets her jaw, looks steadily at Wyatt. “We need to get you back to Mason Industries,” she says. “I’ll call Ms. Preston on the way.”

A tense drive in a nondescript government sedan later, Wyatt strides into the area of Mason Industries near the landing pad that he’s started thinking of as the computer farm, since it’s lined with giant computer monitors. He’s shed the gear the Homeland agents had given him for the raid, is down to his own black tactical pants and t-shirt.

He’s already caught sight of Lucy when he realizes that looking for her was an automatic instinct, in the same way he checks the sightlines to the exits when he enters a room or reaches for his pistol when surprised out of sleep. He chooses not to examine this fact too closely.

Lucy is dressed how he imagines she would have dressed on days when she was teaching—businesslike enough to meet the often-unfair “professionalism” standards women are held to in fields like hers (Jessica hadn’t been a teacher, but she _had_ been someone who went to work in skirts and blazers with men who showed up in jeans and polo shirts, and Wyatt knows the rant about that double standard like the back of his hand), but casual enough to be comfortable. The pushed-up sleeves of the blazer leave her soul mark plainly visible. He chooses not to examine how much he likes that too closely either.

She gives him a nod of greeting when he and Agent Christopher join her and Mason behind Rufus at one of the computers. She looks a little pale, and he thinks back over the texts they’d exchanged since their last mission, wonders if she’s been putting an overly-positive spin on how things are going with her mother or if she’s just tired. There’s a determined set to her jaw, though, and Agent Christopher is already asking Rufus for an update, so Wyatt just makes a mental note to check in with her later, when they can speak in private.

“Flynn is somewhere in this 50 square mile area in northwest Germany, 1944,” Rufus says, gesturing toward the map on his computer screen.

“What’s so special about there?” Christopher asks tersely.

“That’s the thing,” Rufus says. “Not much. Lots of forest, some farmland… a local castle.”

“What about the date?” Mason asks, cutting Rufus off. “Any significance?” He’s looking at Lucy now, and Wyatt looks over to her as well.

“There is one thing,” she says, looking down at the computer screen. She points to a particular spot. “There was a tavern called Das Stein Haus, here.” She looks at Mason, Agent Christopher. “It _may_ have been a rendezvous place for the Allied Resistance.” Shrugging, she gives them all an apologetic look. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure. Information about Resistance activity is still sketchy decades later. But maybe someone can point us in the right direction.”

Agent Christopher nods, gives them her “why aren’t you already in wardrobe” look. Wyatt clenches his teeth in frustration.

“Just so we’re clear,” he says, fixing a hard stare on Christopher, “you want to drop us into Nazi Germany, where we’ll roll up blind to some _bar_ , and somehow convince professional spies who don’t know us and whose protocols we aren’t sure of to help us?”

“It’s either that or give the Nazis a nuclear weapon,” Lucy says, voice quiet but firm.

Wyatt sighs, runs his fingers through his hair in mild agitation.

“Aside from the obvious concerns I have about visiting Nazi Germany, does anyone here even speak German?” Rufus asks.

“I do,” Wyatt says absently, his mind already running though the potential extra difficulty of protecting Rufus in Nazi Germany.

“Really?” Lucy says, surprise in her voice. Wyatt looks up to find her giving him a speculative look. “You do?”

“Uh, yeah,” he confirms. He feels unaccountably awkward and resists the urge to scratch the back of his neck bashfully. “Four languages, actually.”

“Oh,” she says, her expression shifting from surprised to impressed.

“The Army drops us into other places than Palo Alto.”

Lucy tilts her head slightly in acknowledgement, then looks at Mason. “I don’t suppose the wardrobe’s supply includes clothes from outside the United States?”

Five minutes later Mason is showing them the completed expanded wardrobe dock, which Wyatt thinks looks depressingly vast.

“Isn’t this all a bit… much?” Lucy says warily as Mason leads them toward the appropriate section of the dock.

“Well,” Mason says with clearly forced cheerfulness, “better to have and not need than need and… not have.” The forced cheer drops away and for a moment Wyatt sees not the enigmatic tech mogul Mason often presents himself as but instead a simple scientist who has found himself in over his head. “And it doesn’t seem these missions will be ending any time soon,” he adds glumly.

Wyatt accepts a set of clothes from one of the wardrobe assistants and heads to the new changing room setup attached to the expanded dock. There are, he notes gratefully, showers in addition to sinks and toilets. He sees lockers labeled with his and Rufus’ names as well as several unlabeled ones, which Wyatt decides don’t bear thinking about because he doesn’t want to consider that this will become a major enough operation to require multiple teams.

Once dressed, Wyatt passes by Lucy in the main wardrobe dock area, making adjustments to her makeup. As he approaches, he sees her stop moving and stare at herself, unblinking and perhaps unseeing, in the mirror. His earlier concern for her returns.

“Are you okay?” he asks. She doesn’t move, and he steps closer to her. “Lucy? You all right?”

She blinks, and her eyes finally focus again, meeting Wyatt’s gaze in the mirror. She nods slightly. “I’m good,” she says, and though Wyatt is anything but convinced, there’s a hint of steel in her gaze that convinces him to once again let it go. For now.

=========

Lucy knows Wyatt doesn’t believe that she’s as okay as she says he is, but he lets it go and she’s grateful for it. She wants to confide in him, will eventually, but for now what she needs is to just get in that tiny Lifeboat and figure out how to stop Flynn from doing whatever it is he’s doing.

Wyatt is waiting for her at the wardrobe dock exit, and though he doesn’t say a word and barely touches her, the small amount of pressure at the small of her back is a comfort as they walk together toward the Lifeboat. They clamber in and begin to get settled.

“So,” Wyatt says, conversational tone covering the tension she knows he’s feeling, “when we get to this tavern, how do we let them know we’re friendly?”

Lucy raises her eyebrows and grimaces a little. “Well, according to what I’ve read, you order a specific cognac at the bar.” She pauses for a second as she fumbles with the straps of her safety belt, wants to be sure she says the right thing. “A, um… ’23 Remy Martin.”

Wyatt does not miss her hesitation. He leans forward to fasten her belt for her, a service that has already become a ritual just a few missions in. “This,” he says in a tone that mixes concern and amusement in equal measures, “would be the still-sketchy-after-decades-of-research information you mentioned before?”

She frowns, both at the reminder of just how blind they’re going into this mission and because she finds it irritating that the Lifeboat’s safety belts remain a mystery to her when he manages them so easily. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Wyatt finishes adjusting her straps just as Rufus tells them to hold on. He settles back into his seat, and as the Lifeboat’s journey through time begins to tug painfully at Lucy’s stomach, she focuses on the feeling of Wyatt’s knees brushing against hers.

The gut-wrenching trip ends, and Lucy groans a little as she reaches for her buckles. Wyatt, who looks characteristically ill—though she thinks he at least looks like he’ll be able to keep from vomiting on this go-round, which is nice—releases his buckles and leans forward a little, resting his elbow on her knee (not that she particularly notices or thinks it means anything, of course, it’s just the close quarters of the Lifeboat after all, she wouldn’t presume to read into the action, of course she wouldn’t) and holding his forehead. “We really need to start bringing some Dramamine,” he mutters.

Lucy and Rufus both make vaguely affirmative noises, and then Rufus reaches up and presses the series of buttons that will open the Lifeboat’s door. Lucy, still feeling a little sick, looks out the door. At the sight of the young Nazi soldier standing outside the door staring at them, she nearly freezes, manages to whisper “Oh my God,” which is enough to have Wyatt tensing and looking up. Before she can really process what’s happening, Wyatt has fumbled his gun out of his holster with none of his usual finesse, and the Nazi is lying on the ground.

“There’s no way he’s out here alone,” Wyatt says, and for all that he still looks pretty green around the gills, he’s clearly shifted into soldier mode. He clambers out of the Lifeboat and, gun in one hand and surveying the surrounding forest, almost absent-mindedly holds up and hand for Lucy to brace on as she climbs out after him. She’s a little shaken (she did just watch a man die just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, after all), but the warmth of his hand is a comfort. Before she can turn to offer Rufus help, he jumps down after her.

“Stay behind me,” Wyatt says softly. He begins walking away from the Lifeboat. Lucy and Rufus trail after him, and Rufus looks to be just as unsettled by the whole experience as Lucy is. After a few minutes, they find another Nazi soldier.

“So,” Lucy whispers, “how do we…” Her question is cut off by two gunshots, muffled by the silencer screwed to the end of the gun. She freezes at the sound of the soldier’s body hitting the ground, watches in shock as Wyatt rushes over to the man. By the time she and Rufus have raced after him, he’s rifling through the man’s pockets, collecting papers and weapons and stuffing them in his own pockets.

“You couldn’t have, I don’t know… tied him up or something?” she asks, her tone somewhere between censorious and pleading.

Wyatt gives her a level look, then glances around the forest as if he’s worried more Nazis are going to pop out from behind the trees. Which, Lucy supposes, is not entirely improbable. “Yeah,” he says tightly, “I could’ve. But he might have escaped.” The words are matter-of-fact but there’s an edge to the tone that Lucy can’t quite pin down, and she wonders how many people Sergeant Wyatt Logan has had to kill in his life, and if perhaps he might be getting tired of it.

“Look,” she says. “I get that you didn’t have a choice with the first guy. But if you don’t have to kill someone, you shouldn’t.” She thinks about her sister, never born because her parents didn’t meet, and wonders if this man was supposed to meet someone and have children. “We have to at least _try_ and protect history.”

“Protect _Nazis_?” Wyatt says, a little incredulous as he points to the insignia on the man’s uniform.

Lucy shakes her head immediately. “No, not specifically, of course not. I’m just saying there’s… a bigger picture here.” Her hand goes to the locket she now never takes off, and Wyatt’s face softens a little. She knows he understands, even if he doesn’t quite agree.

The low drone of multiple engines approaching rapidly snaps them into action to get out of sight. Lucy helps Wyatt move the body, and she wonders how long it will be before shit like this happening to her starts to feel _normal_ , and whether or not she should be concerned if or when it does. If Wyatt killing actual literal Nazis hadn’t been enough of a reminder of how deadly serious this mission was, the missile they watch pass them by on the back of a lumbering military vehicle certainly would have done it. Lucy numbly helps Wyatt and Rufus cover the dead Nazi’s body more thoroughly with fallen branches and leaves and tries to push against the closed-in feeling that has become an increasingly present part of her life.

Soon enough, they make their way to the bar and crouch behind a low mound to strategize.

“All right,” Wyatt says, taking charge as he tends to any time it starts to feel like they’re planning a tactical operation. “Lucy and I will go in, order the drink, and hopefully get some help.” He cocks his head to the side and gives a small, wry smirk. “Or at least not die.” He looks over to Rufus. “Rufus…”

“Stays right here,” Rufus interrupts, staring steadily at the bar.

“No,” Wyatt responds firmly. Lucy focuses on his face and the way his jaw moves as he talks and reacts to Rufus’ responses, trying to ground herself in the present (past?) instead of getting caught in the memory of her car accident. “I need you to go get one of those cars,” he’s saying. He points to where a number of cars are parked next to the bar. Rufus glances at them briefly then gives Wyatt a stubborn glare.

“Rufus _stays right here_ ,” he repeats.

“We don’t know who or what is in there,” Wyatt says impatiently. “Lucy and I might as well be going in blind because we can’t be sure the information we have is accurate. If things go south, we’re going to need a car with the engine running.”

Rufus grimaces, sighs. “I can hotwire one,” he finally says, though when Lucy glances over at him she thinks he already looks like he regrets it.

“All right, good,” Wyatt says, pushing up from the ground. “Just make it fast, okay?”

Wyatt rests his hand lightly, so lightly she almost doesn’t notice it, at the small of her back as they head into the bar. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the interior lighting after the bright sunlight of outside, but they make their way over to the bar. Lucy gives the barman a tentative smile and lets Wyatt do the talking. His German is, to her non-German-speaking mind, quite convincing, though she imagines the native Germans in the room can tell he isn’t German. Maybe even that he’s American.

Even if she doesn’t understand the words, she hears the frustration in Wyatt’s tone, feels his annoyance in the stiff way he holds himself while they make their way to a table with two glasses of whisky for their trouble. She tells herself to stay calm, but the feeling from earlier, the sense memory of being trapped in her flooding car, comes rushing back. She stares at Wyatt’s hand sitting deceptively relaxed on the table as he sips his drink. It’s his left hand, and if his sleeves were pulled just a bit further back she’d be able to make out his soul mark on his wrist. The thought of his soul mark—her words on his skin—is somehow both a comfort and an additional reason to feel like she’s drowning.

She picks up her glass, cursing internally at the way her hand shakes, the way she can’t stop it. She stares sightlessly at the center of the table, sips the whisky and barely flinches at the burn of it. Her hand shakes all the way back down to the table, and she loosens her grip on the glass, tries to remind herself that she isn’t actually drowning. Wyatt reaches out with his free hand and closes his fingers around hers, squeezing just tightly enough to get her attention. She looks up, meets his eyes.

They’re having some kind of wordless conversation through a series of raised eyebrows and tiny headshakes when a stupidly handsome man in a German uniform steps up to their table. Lucy reminds herself she shouldn’t find Nazis attractive and watches Wyatt’s face tense in response to whatever the man is saying.

It’s clear Wyatt is distressed from his tone, and from the way he grips her arm at the elbow when he pulls her to her feet. The man walks behind them, herding them out the back door of the bar towards a nearby shed of some kind. She sees out of the corner of her eye that Wyatt is slowly drawing his weapon. As they fully enter the shed, Lucy instinctually huddles just behind and to the side of Wyatt, her back to the action, as she hears the sound of two guns being readied to fire. She stiffens, but then the man speaks.

“Put it away,” he bites out in British-accented English. “Now. Before you get us all shot.”

Lucy whirls around, mouth open in surprise. Has this actually _worked_? Wyatt holds his position, as does the man.

“Perhaps you can tell by my accent,” he continues, still not lowering his weapon, “but I’m not German. You idiots.”

“Uh… what?” Lucy manages, stepping forward slightly. The men seem to take this as a sign they can both lower their guns, as they do so simultaneously. “You’re…”

“Allied Resistance,” he says, cutting Lucy off. He sounds even more frustrated than Wyatt had earlier. “I _was_ in the middle of gathering intel, until _you two_ waltzed in. I _swear_ ,” he adds, “you Americans! You couldn’t stand out more if you tried!”

Rufus chooses that moment to burst into the shed, holding a gun on the British agent. “Don’t move!”

The agent gives a blasé look over his shoulder, turns back to Lucy and Wyatt and rolls his eyes. “I stand corrected,” he says, and Lucy thinks incongruously of the dry British comedies she used to watch with her father—the one who raised her, obviously, not the man she doesn’t know and her mother won’t tell her about.

“Rufus!” Lucy exclaims, holding her hand up. “Rufus, it’s okay. He’s… okay.”

“We work with the OSS,” Wyatt begins as Rufus lowers his gun. “I’m Agent…” he trails off, and Lucy wonders how it is that the one person on their team with anything even close to actual espionage experience is the worst at coming up with fake names. He sighs, shrugs. “I’m Wyatt Logan,” he says. “This is Lucy Preston,” he gestures at Lucy, “and that’s our pilot. Rufus Carlin.”

“Well,” the agent says, and Lucy would swear that she could actually see the charm switch on as he turns toward her, steps forward. “It’s a relief to see a lovely face,” he takes her hand and lifts it up, leans down to kiss it, and looks back up at her. “In an ugly place.”

Lucy spares a moment to wonder what kind of soul mark this man will end up giving to his soul mate. He’s certainly laying the charm on thick considering they don’t have each other’s words. She doesn’t turn to look at Wyatt, but she can _feel_ the tension radiating off of him in waves. Things may still be up in the air with her and Wyatt and their soulmate relationship, but at the very least it’s clear that there is _something_ there—they just have to decide if and when they’re ready to build on it.

Before Lucy can pull her hand out of his grip, the agent has dropped it himself and shifted so he can see the whole team at once. “Now,” he says, with forced brightness, “what are you lot doing here besides cocking up my operation?”

Lucy looks at Wyatt. She’s usually the person who deals with historical people, but Wyatt’s the one who knows how soldiers and covert operatives talk to each other.

Wyatt sighs. “Look, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather take this conversation someplace with fewer Nazis.”

Rufus raises his hand in the endearingly awkward way he has, that Lucy is beginning to find strangely comforting. “I’ve got a car.”

In sync, Lucy and Wyatt gesture towards Rufus and the door. The man nods and turns to follow Rufus out.

“Wait,” Lucy says. “What’s your name?” She can’t keep thinking of him as _the man_ or _the agent_ or _the unfairly hot guy with the accent_.

“Fleming,” he says smoothly. “Ian Fleming. MI-6.”

Lucy’s gaping. She knows she is. She should probably stop. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Wyatt’s head snap up and he steps forward.

“Wait a minute,” he says deliberately. “ _You’re_ … Ian Fleming?” His voice does a _thing_ when he says Fleming’s name, the tone going strangely high for a moment as though he’s having to try very, very hard to stay calm. Lucy can understand that, though, as she is still gaping and staring wide-eyed at him.

“Have we _met_?” Fleming asks testily.

“Nope,” Wyatt responds, voice filled with suppressed mirth. Lucy looks over at him and she’s never seen him look so delighted. “It’s… I… we…” he points between himself and Lucy like he’s trying to come up with something useful to say, gives up. “No.” His smile is ridiculous now, and Lucy shifts her wide-eyed gaze back to Fleming, who shrugs and looks at Rufus.

“Right,” he says. “Shall we?” He doesn’t wait for a response and just walks out of the shed. Rufus gives Lucy and Wyatt a stern look, but Wyatt is already pointing out the door.

“That’s…”

“I know.” Lucy gestures toward the door. “We’ll talk about it _later_. We need to _go_.”

=========

Wyatt struggles to hold back his excitement as he sits in the backseat of the car Rufus hotwired, Lucy next to him. He’s in a car with _Ian Fleming_. _Ian fucking Fleming_ is driving him to his _safe house_.

Wyatt is completely calm and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty liar.

Rufus has gratefully ceded the driving responsibilities to Fleming, and he is sitting in the front seat. He looks calmer than Wyatt probably does, and that’s not something Wyatt expected to ever happen if he’s being honest. Lucy is sliding amused looks in Wyatt’s direction when she isn’t staring out the window and taking deep, even breaths. The careful breathing is a habit Wyatt has noticed she tends to indulge in when she is trying to keep herself from panicking. He thinks about reaching out over the seat to take her hand, but he’s not sure how helpful that would actually be.

Within a few minutes, they’ve arrived at Fleming’s safe house. He guides Wyatt, Lucy, and Rufus to his dining room and then excuses himself, saying that he doesn’t like staying in the uniform longer than necessary. This is a sentiment Wyatt can appreciate and understand. He waits until Fleming is out of earshot and then lets his face slide back into a ridiculous grin.

“That’s _Ian Fleming_ ,” he whisper-shouts, looking back and forth between Rufus and Lucy. “ _The_ Ian Fleming! The dude who wrote James Bond!”

“Yes,” Lucy says calmly, taking a seat at the table. Her words are measured, even, but Wyatt can hear the tension underneath. “He was an actual spy in World War II.” She glances in the direction Fleming had left the room. “A good one, by all accounts.” She tilts her head a little. “You a Bond fan?”

Wyatt wills himself not to blush, tries to act casual. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “A little bit.”

Lucy looks like she’s not buying the “little bit” part in any way, shape, or form. Rufus is looking around the room with a smile. “Me too,” he says, offhand. “Love the movies.”

“And the books,” Wyatt mutters under his breath. He refuses to look at Lucy. He’s saved from embarrassing himself further by Fleming’s return. He’s stripped off the vast majority of his German uniform, leaving him in the trousers and an undershirt. He walks into the room carrying a bottle of wine with a corkscrew stuck in the cork.

“So,” he says, setting down the bottle as he does, “you lot are chasing an atomic weapon?” He looks skeptical. “Those are only theoretical.”

Wyatt shakes his head and tries not to think about all the times James Bond saved the world from nuclear disaster. “No, they’re real,” he says, voice serious. “The high-level threat we’re tracking, he stole a functional prototype.”

“We think he’s going to give it to the Nazis,” Lucy says from her seat at the table, quiet but firm.

Fleming looks increasingly concerned. Wyatt presses the point home. “We saw a convoy on the way here… they had a flatbed truck with a V-2 rocket on it.”

“And you think the Krauts are going to try to arm it with this… atom bomb?”

“That’s the theory,” Rufus says with a nod.

Fleming furrows his brow. “That would explain the intel I’ve been collecting,” he says. He reaches into the pocket of his trousers and pulls out a folded-up map. “Here, take a look at this,” he adds, unfolding the map and laying it out on the table. He points to a spot on the map. “Here, this is Castle Valar.” He looks up at Wyatt. “Next to it, the Nazis have been building a launch pad.” Wyatt leans down to peer at the map, while Fleming continues to speak. “They’re holding a demonstration of the V-2 rocket. Tonight.”

“What kind of demonstration?” Lucy asks.

“Ah,” Fleming says, and Wyatt recognizes the bitterness in his tone, soldier to soldier. “Select members of the German High Command—and their special guests—are going to sip champagne and listen to chamber music, with a short break to watch that rocket be launched into Belgium.”

Lucy gives Wyatt a concerned glance.

“The target,” Fleming continues, drawing Lucy and Wyatt’s attention back to him, “is civilians and Allied troops.” He shakes his head. “This atomic weapon… how powerful is it?”

“It’ll completely obliterate everything in a three-mile radius,” Rufus says reluctantly, glancing warily between Wyatt and Fleming.

Fleming is visibly taken aback. “That’d be worse than all the damage done during the Blitz,” he says.

Wyatt nods. “If you can get us to the launch pad, we’ll be able to disarm the rocket.” He says it confidently, but then it occurs to him that he hadn’t actually _asked_ Rufus if he could do it. He looks at Rufus over his shoulder. “Right?”

Rufus blinks. “I mean, probably, yeah,” he says, but he’s shaking his head while he says it instead of nodding, and Wyatt holds back a grimace. “I guess so,” Rufus adds, and Wyatt thinks it’s perhaps the least confident he’s heard Rufus sound about anything, which given Rufus’ propensity to get nervous is saying something.

“All right,” Fleming says, raising his eyebrows. He reaches for the wine bottle he’d set down when he came in. “Well,” he says, pulling out the cork with a loud pop, “first things first.” He starts to pour the wine out into four glasses.

Rufus shoots a wide-eyed look at Wyatt, who shrugs. “We’re drinking now?” Rufus asks.

Fleming grins. “Well, considering what you’ve already been through, and what we’re _about_ to go through… yes.”

“Amen to that,” Wyatt says, picking up a glass and raising it in Fleming’s direction. He tries not to let his excitement over _sharing a drink with Ian Fleming_ show. He glances down at Lucy and sees she’s just staring at her glass while the rest of them drink, that faraway look in her eyes again.

“It’s bad form to leave a poured glass full,” Fleming says, holding Lucy’s glass out to her. Wyatt looks down at her again, more critically. She’s pale again, and there’s a very slight tremor in her hand when she reaches out and take the glass. Wyatt shifts his gaze to Fleming, feels his spine stiffen at the steady, warm look the man is giving Lucy. She takes a sip of the wine and Fleming smiles at her, sets his own glass down and leaves the room, presumably to start prepping for their operation.

Rufus shifts closer to Wyatt and whispers in his ear. “Dude, James Bond just hit on Lucy.” Wyatt’s jaw clenches involuntarily, but he manages to turn to Rufus and roll his eyes. When he looks back down at Lucy, the faraway look is back in her eyes and she’s sipping absentmindedly at the wine in her hand. He puts a light hand on her shoulder. She leans into it for a second, then seems to startle. She looks up at him, a silent question in her eyes.

He slides into the chair next to hers, keeping his hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

“I told you earlier I’m fine,” she says after a slight hesitation.

Wyatt gives her a mildly stern look. “Mmm hmm,” he says. “You did. You look about as okay now as you did then.” He looks appraisingly into her eyes. “Let’s put it this way: are you okay enough to stay on your toes out there? I can only do so much to protect you if you aren’t.”

Lucy takes a final sip of her wine, sets down the empty glass. She meets Wyatt’s eyes and he can practically see the steel forming behind hers. “I’m good.” He searches her face for a moment, trying to decide if she’s really focused enough. “Wyatt,” she says, reaching out to touch his arm, her fingers brushing over the spot on his wrist where his soul mark is covered by his shirt and jacket. “I promise I’d tell you if I weren’t. And I’ll tell you what’s wrong as soon as I get the chance.” She smiles a little. “I promised I wasn’t going to keep anything from you, after all.”

Wyatt nods. “Okay, then.”

The sound of Fleming returning to the room has Lucy pulling her hand back awkwardly while Wyatt jumps to his feet. Fleming has put the German uniform back on, with the exception of his hat. All business now, he lays out a plan to get them to the launch pad so that Rufus can look for the nuke, and within a few minutes they’re trudging down the road. Rufus walks ahead with Fleming while Wyatt stays by Lucy’s side. She’s looking more alert and less pale than she was earlier, but he feels more comfortable with her close by until he knows what’s wrong.

He starts to feel less concerned about Lucy’s general well-being while they’re at the launch pad and Flynn shows up, because Lucy snaps into “protector of history” mode and so far that’s seemed to be her toughest and most stubborn mode. Wyatt is frustrated and reluctantly impressed by the passion with which Lucy insists he can’t risk shooting Flynn because of one smart Nazi who _happens_ to be important for the future. He thinks about shooting Flynn anyway; he’s got a modern gun so he can be fairly confident of its accuracy, but no one makes a hundred percent of their shots and then the smart Nazi steps directly between Wyatt and Flynn and Lucy’s tension level rises so swiftly that Wyatt doesn’t even have to look at her to feel it. And then she says the magic words—“trust me”—and with a grimace Wyatt lowers his gun.

They make their way back to Fleming’s safe house, and once they’re inside Wyatt and Fleming both grill Lucy about the reasons for not risking Von Braun getting shot. Wyatt is still frustrated, but he does remember hearing about Axis scientists being recruited by the Allies, and it’s not like Lucy would lie to him about _history_.

It’s a relief to Wyatt when Fleming announces that through his cover within the German military he can get into the night’s party, but that’s swiftly replaced with frustration and an uncomfortable edge of panic when Fleming adds that Wyatt and Rufus will be outside on perimeter duty.

“She doesn’t get in without me,” Wyatt insists, because he _has_ to protect her. It’s his job. _And she’s my soulmate_ , he thinks but won’t admit.

Wyatt is ready to fight Fleming’s insistence that he can only get Lucy in with him, until Fleming—the guy who created (will create? Wyatt hates time travel) _James Bond_ , which is great but not a paragon of feminist virtue by any measure—plays his trump card. “She’s a capable operative just the same as you and I, isn’t she?”

Wyatt feels the muscles in his jaw twitch as he resists the urge to clench his teeth. Lucy is certainly a competent and highly intelligent human being but to be _fair_ , he thinks, she _isn’t_ an agent and _doesn’t_ have the kind of training that Fleming assumes she does. Still, he can’t argue the point without blowing their cover _and_ likely pissing Lucy off in the process. He glances at her, and she’s got a look on her face that is a cross between amusement at his predicament, annoyance at the impression that he’s undermining her, and a faint twinge of concern because she _is_ highly intelligent and knows her own limitations. Wyatt shrugs.

Fleming excuses himself to get a uniform for Lucy. Wyatt runs a hand through his hair in agitation, looks to Lucy. “If I get a shot at Flynn, I have to take it.” He considers telling her about Agent Christopher’s increasing frustration with the fact that he _hasn’t_ taken out Flynn yet, but that feels too much like whining. It’s Wyatt’s problem, not Lucy’s.

Lucy shakes her head. “Wyatt, you can’t. We can’t risk Von Braun, and Flynn will probably be sticking close to him because he knows we can’t.” She sighs, frustrated, gives him what he’s beginning to recognize as her _not-fucking-up-history-is-really-important-to-me_ look. “After the war,” she says, sounding somehow both professorial and extremely frustrated at the fact that Wyatt keeps coming back to this, “he comes to America and jumpstarts our entire rocket program.”

“He’s the guy that gets us to the moon,” Rufus says, and Wyatt looks at him in slight surprise. He hadn’t expected Rufus to come to the defense of a Nazi, even a scientist. “NASA’s because of him,” Rufus adds, and Wyatt thinks _well that explains that_ , because he knows how important NASA is to Rufus. “We win the space race because of him,” he says, and Lucy picks up the thread immediately.

“And the Cold War. He helped define modern America,” Lucy says. She grimaces a little. “For better or worse, he’s too important to risk.”

Wyatt knows better than to push back more when he’s got both Lucy and Rufus united against him, but one thing sticks out to him that he can’t help but point out. “If Von Braun’s so important to America,” he asks, and he knows he’s not keeping the frustration out of his tone but can’t seem to care, “why doesn’t Flynn just kill him?”

Lucy and Rufus exchange concerned glances, but they don’t have an answer for that question any more than Wyatt does.

=========

If Fleming notices the thick tension in the room when he returns with a German uniform for Lucy, he doesn’t comment on it. He hands her the clothes and then, with a solicitous, if slightly flirtatious, hand between her shoulder blades (Lucy doesn’t miss the flinty look in Wyatt’s eyes at the gesture) he leads her to a bedroom where she can change.

She can almost taste how much she hates putting on the uniform, its thick fabric adorned with Nazi patches. Her tie is hanging loose around her neck as she stands in front of the mirror and attaches the swastika pin to the jacket lapel with shaking hands. There’s bile rising in the back of her throat, she wants to tear off the uniform and run to the Lifeboat, wants to let Wyatt and Rufus clean up the Flynn mess without her-

She can’t run, she feels too responsible, and she needs to get her sister back. She has to stay and she has to fight-

She _can’t_ fight, she can’t _breathe_ , she’s trapped, her car is sinking and she’s going to _drown_ and there’s nothing she can do to stop it and _no one is coming she can’t stop this she can’t fix this there’s no one to save her she can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can’t-_

“Hey.”

Wyatt’s voice, quiet but strong, a surfeit of meaning imbued to a single, simple syllable.

Lucy breathes in, a deep gulp of air. _Wyatt. Safe._

She exhales, takes another calming, even breath as she meets his steady gaze in the mirror. “Don’t you know how to knock?” she asks briskly, fiddling uselessly with the things on the dressing table.

“I did,” Wyatt says, his voice low and implacable. “Twice.” There’s concern but not pity, rebuke but not anger. He’s still looking at her with that steady gaze of his and she feels more sharply than ever before the connection between them. _Soulmate. Safe._

“Oh,” Lucy says awkwardly. She picks up the watch and the jewelry she’d been wearing with her Mason Industries-provided outfit and turns to look at Wyatt directly. “That’s… good, then.” She bites her lip, doesn’t look him in the eye. “I don’t want to fight about Von Braun,” she says. She doesn’t have the energy for it and she doesn’t want to fight with Wyatt in general, anyway.

“Good,” he says. “Neither do I. Let’s talk about something else.” He moves toward a chair a few feet away from the end of the bed, motions for her to follow. He sits on the arm of the chair, and she leans against the bed’s footboard.

“What are we talking about?” she asks cautiously. She’s got a pretty good idea of what it probably is, and she knows that she really should talk to him about it. She was hoping they’d at least get through this mission first, but it looks like Wyatt’s decided her time of putting him off is up and now it’s time for talking.

“How about you putting up a pretty good front,” he says, looking her straight in the eyes. “But I see in you the same thing I’ve seen a thousand times in a thousand other people.”

“What’s that?” she asks, a little sharply because she’s already feeling defensive.

“New soldier in the field,” he says with a shrug. “Freaking out.”

Lucy musters a dismissive laugh. “I am not… I am _not_ freaking out. I’m… I’m not.”

Wyatt just shakes his head and keeps holding her gaze. “People in your position have two options,” he says calmly, the rationality in his tone soothing. He’s taken off his jacket and pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, and when he gestures she catches sight of her words on his wrist. Something settles gently in her chest, a blanket instead of a stone. “Get over the hump,” he’s saying, and she focuses on the words. “Or crack up.”

She nods a little. She can have this conversation now after all. She can admit her weakness to him after all. “How do I… get over the hump?” she asks with a heavy sigh, dropping the watch and jewelry on the bed behind her with her clothes, twisting her fingers together once her hands are empty.

Wyatt smiles a bit. “You talk about it.”

“You _never_ talk,” she responds quickly. Wyatt is not what she would call an open book, after all. They’d literally been in _jail_ when he opened up about Jessica to her.

“I’m over the hump,” he says, his smile widening a fraction before he sobers, raises his eyebrows to encourage her to talk.

“I shouldn’t even be here,” she says, because it seems like the best way to begin to explain things.

“Nazi Germany?” he asks, puffing out a humorless laugh. “Pretty sure none of us _should_ be here.”

“No,” Lucy says, and something in her tone has Wyatt going still, tension in the line of his shoulders. “I mean I… shouldn’t be…” she gestures widely. “Here.” She shakes her head. “My sophomore year of college, I decided I didn’t want to be an historian after all.”

Wyatt smiles again. “What were you gonna do instead?” There’s a warmth in his tone that Lucy thinks means he’s genuinely interested in this tidbit of her past, and it steadies her.

She grins wryly. “Join a band,” she admits. “Lead singer, that was gonna be me. The next Stevie Nicks.” She looks down, smooths out imaginary wrinkles in her skirt. “I was driving to my mom’s house. To tell her. I knew she wouldn’t approve, so I had this whole speech prepared, and I’m going over it in my head.” She slips into the present tense, can see everything happening in her head, like watching a movie that’s been playing on repeat somewhere in the back of her mind since she was nineteen. “I’m thinking so much about what words to use that I don’t see the oil slick on the road. Right before a bridge,” she muses, lost in the moment. “I spin out, into the river. The car fills up with water so fast, it shuts down, I can’t open the windows or the doors, and I’m thinking _this is it, this is how I go_.” She shakes herself, focuses on Wyatt’s clear blue eyes. The movie dissolves and she slips back into the past tense. “Someone happened by and pulled me out.”

She lifts her hands briefly, _there you have it_ , goes back to twisting her fingers together in agitation. “Since then, I’ve done everything I can to only be in situations I can control.”

“Sure,” Wyatt says, a gratifying measure of understanding in his tone. “Makes sense.”

Lucy scoffs. “And now… this _thing_ we’re doing… even finding you…” She absently touches her arm and Wyatt tracks the movement, flexing his wrist. Her words dance over the tendons and muscles as he moves, and she tells herself that it is not distracting in the least. She drops her hand, looks down at her shoes. “Every time I get in that time machine,” she says, emotion rising in her tone, “I feel like I am back in that car, like I’m drowning all over again, and I just…” She looks up and finds him watching her intently. “I just don’t think I can keep doing this.”

Wyatt nods contemplatively.

“How do you keep doing this?” she asks, hating the plaintive note in the question.

He folds his arms, and the play of muscles under his shirt is almost artfully framed by the shoulder holster he’s wearing. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the list of things she’s found inappropriately attractive in the last six hours grows again.

“I grew up in West Texas, dirt poor,” he begins. He’s looking down at the floor now, but she thinks he’s seeing West Texas rather than the decorative rug and hardwood flooring. “My dad was a world-class sonofabitch, but my Grandpa Sherwin…” He looks up and smiles. “He picked up all the slack.” He tilts his head to the side, pauses briefly and smiles again. “He’s probably actually less than 200 miles away right now.” He laughs, short and reflective. “Younger than me. In the 101st, killin’ Nazis.” He gets a faraway look in his eyes, and Lucy wants to say something but has no idea what to say. So she just waits, watches him until he continues. “That’s why saving Nazis… or letting Lincoln die… that’s hard for me. Even though we’re supposed to be protecting the timeline.” He seems to search for the right words for a moment. “It feels… like I’m letting him down.”

Lucy nods, just a bit. She understands; even after losing her sister she’s still so tempted to change something, anything, for the better and damn the ripples in the metaphorical pond it might cause. Wyatt’s quiet for a moment, gazing off to the side and gathering his thoughts.

“He’s the reason I fight,” he finally says, looking up at Lucy again. “To make him proud.” He gets to his feet and closes the distance between them. Lucy straightens so that she’s not leaning against the bedframe anymore, looks up at Wyatt’s face as he reaches for her loose tie.

“Figure out what you’re fighting for,” he says softly, arranging her tie for her. “And you’ll be fine.” He smiles encouragingly.

Lucy reaches up almost unconsciously and touches the tie, smiles back. “Thank you,” she says. “For talking. Even if you’re over the hump.”

The moment feels charged, and Lucy drops her hands to her side because what she wants to do is reach out and touch Wyatt. But she doesn’t drop her gaze, and neither does he. “Sure thing,” he says, then grins wryly. He reaches out and gently grips her arm, unerringly falling where her soul mark is. “Ma’am.”

It should annoy her. She’d certainly been annoyed the first time. Two missions ago, she might still have been. It doesn’t annoy her anymore. Instead, the title sounds like an endearment and it feels like there are sparks under every line of his words on her arm, the scrawled text a gently buzzing live wire that’s part of a circuit completed whenever they touch.

Their gazes hold, and for a breathless moment she wonders if he’s going to kiss her, if she _wants_ him to kiss her ( _obviously_ , mutters her traitorous inner monologue), wonders if he’s ready to cross the careful boundaries they’ve silently negotiated over the last week, wonders if _she’s_ ready. Then, with a slightly melancholy half-smile, he gently squeezes her arm before slipping past her and out of the room, leaving her to finish getting ready.

The rest of the mission is a blur.

Fleming’s hand covering hers on the balustrade as they look out over the crowd.

_(Lucy thinks again about Fleming and soul marks. Does he even have one? If there’s a woman out there with his words, does he have hers? In the Bond films, Bond’s soul mark had been a mystery until the Lazenby movie, after which it was generally the source of a moment of pathos before Bond hooked up with the movie’s lady du jour. In the Craig reboot, they gave Bond two soul marks, which was the source of much chatter (“Is the world ready for poly Bond?”) until the first movie was actually released and his first soulmate died at the end. But Lucy doesn’t remember reading anything about Fleming’s own soul mark or marks.)_

Flynn insisting he’s a patriot for wanting to hand Von Braun to the Soviets.

_(Lucy thinks this is insane, Flynn’s whole Rittenhouse story and how he uses it to justify the horrors he’s committing, but there’s something in his eyes that sparks a flicker of doubt. Some kind of pain, the kind of hopeless determination that Lucy doesn’t think can come from nothing. In spite of herself, she wonders.)_

The explosion, Fleming’s sleeve gun, Wyatt and Rufus appearing in the nick of time, snatching Von Braun and finding the priest hole.

_(Not trapped, we can run, we have to run, we have to escape, there’s got to be a way out. Lucy finds a way out and somewhere in her mind, the film runs out on the repeating movie, and the memory of the car crash gets filed away. She takes a deep breath.)_

Waiting out the night in Fleming’s safe house, each of them taking turns making sure Von Braun doesn’t escape.

_(Lucy isn’t disappointed that it’s Wyatt who comes to relieve her when her shift is done. She’s glad she doesn’t have to think about whether or not she can lie down next to him like part of her secretly wants to do, whether or not they’re ready for that kind of intimacy, even though—or perhaps because—they’d only be sleeping.)_

Lucy’s glad to see the back of Von Braun, and she feels just light enough after everything to shake off Fleming’s continued flirtation with a sassy comeback instead of a demure deflection.

She does _not_ glance at Wyatt’s face after doing so and she is _not_ ridiculously pleased by the expression of delight and triumph on it. She can’t be pleased about it, because she didn’t see it. Really. She didn’t.

=========

The rest of the mission is _not_ a blur for Wyatt. In the heat of a mission, in the heat of a battle, everything is in sharp focus. There are too many details but Wyatt’s brain doggedly processes them all.

He catalogs every emotion in the tangled mess inspired by the sight of Fleming’s hand covering Lucy’s through the binoculars, the jealousy and the frustration and the fear, not that Lucy would somehow decide she wants to stay in Nazi Germany with James Bond, but that even so, Wyatt won’t be enough for her in the end, just like he wasn’t enough for Jess.

The horror at seeing Lucy and Fleming taken into custody is imprinted on Wyatt’s brain. He couldn’t protect Jess, and now Lucy’s in the hands of the Nazis, and he _has_ to protect her.

He notes every detail of Rufus’ hastily concocted plan to sabotage the rocket (even the parts he doesn’t actually understand because he isn’t a rocket scientist), the change in the air after the explosion, the chaos in the castle. The smell of gunpower that lingers after he shoots the soldiers standing over Lucy and Fleming. The way Lucy’s face looks when she sees him. The way Fleming helps her to her feet.

The mix of emotions he can read behind Lucy’s eyes when he tells Fleming that even though he agrees with the man about Von Braun, he trusts Lucy and will do what she says.

The way he spends the whole walk through the priest hole tunnel humming the theme tune from _Skyfall_ under his breath, and the way Lucy raises her eyebrows at him when she realizes he’s doing it.

The soft look in her eyes when he takes over keeping watch on Von Braun, the way her fingers brush across his soul mark as she passes him by.

His absolute and unbridled glee when Lucy shuts down Fleming’s flirtation.

Given that per Lucy, no large-scale catastrophic changes to the timeline have come as a result of their mission, Wyatt decides he does not need to feel guilty about _also_ feeling absolute and unbridled glee when Mason informs them that _there is a new-to-them Bond movie and it is about them_.

Wyatt cannot _wait_ to get home and watch it. He wonders if it will already be included the giant set of Blu-rays he bought when they released it for the 50 th anniversary. He wonders if he’ll already own the novel, which he also cannot wait to read.

Lucy pulls him aside after Agent Christopher dismisses them from debrief.

“Wyatt, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she begins, keeping her voice low. “About figuring out who I’m fighting for. I’m fighting for my sister. I have to get her back.”

Wyatt nods. “Of course you do.”

“But every trip on the Lifeboat, we’re just chasing after Flynn. How am I supposed to get Amy back if I’m busy trying to keep Flynn from blowing up the timeline?”

“Is Jiya still looking into anything for you or did she just figure out about your dad?” he asks.

Lucy shakes her head. “What could I ask her to look at? We already know he married someone else…”

Wyatt closes his eyes and thinks for a second. “Look, Homeland picked you for a reason, right? Maybe it’s because of Rittenhouse like Flynn says or maybe it’s because somehow they knew you’d be great at this, which you are.” He shrugs. “Whatever the reason, they apparently want you here. _You_ , not whatever historian is available. Leverage that.”

One corner of Lucy’s mouth curves into a half-smile. “Strike a deal,” she murmurs. “Tell Agent Christopher I’ll walk if she doesn’t promise to get someone—from Homeland or from Mason, whatever—working on figuring out a plan to get Amy back.”

“Exactly,” Wyatt says, smiling down at Lucy’s upturned face. The light in her eyes dims and she reaches for his hand.

“What about Jessica? You should come with me. Make your own deal.”

Wyatt nearly takes a step backwards in surprise and his hand jerks in hers. “ _You_ want me to try to get Agent Christopher to promise to actually help me figure out how to save my _wife_?” He remembers her face going ashen in 1864 when he asked her if she would keep him from saving Jess, the way she’d touched her soul mark and said he couldn’t ask her that. He remembers the way she’d assured him she understood why he tried to send the telegram in Las Vegas, the way she’d said she was sorry it hadn’t worked. But he thinks that actively supporting an action is different than not objecting, and he’s not sure how he feels about Lucy’s newfound investment in Wyatt saving Jess.

Which, he would later suppose, should have been his first clue that he was already falling in love with Lucy. But instead, he just gapes at her, pulls his hand out of her loose grasp to run it through his hair distractedly before he grinds out, “ _Why_?”

“We’ll be… whatever we’ll be,” she says, and though she doesn’t touch her soul mark, her fingers clench and the muscles in her arm twitch, and at least he knows that she hasn’t decided she doesn’t _care_. “But I don’t want you to not at _least_ be able to say you really tried, and I…” She sighs, straightens to her full height. “If we do… make something out of this whole soulmate thing… I don’t want to have Jessica’s ghost hanging over us.” She shrugs. “And if that means we have to try to save her, then… we’ll try. And if we do save her, the cards will fall how they fall. You had my words all along,” she says, her voice going soft. “And if we don’t manage to save her…”

“At least we’ll know we tried,” Wyatt finishes for her. He’s still surprised by her suggestion but he is pretty impressed by her selflessness. “It sounds great on paper,” he finally says. “I don’t have the same leverage you do, though. I’m government property,” he quips at her when she tilts her head in confusion. “I go where Uncle Sam tells me. I threaten not to do my job, they just offer me a choice between doing my job and being court martialed.” _And,_ he thinks but doesn’t say, _Christopher’s already threatened to fire me for not killing Flynn._ Wyatt’s not even entirely sure he’ll be the one getting the phone call the next time Flynn takes out the Mothership.

Lucy thinks for a minute. “So you stay here, and I’ll make Jessica part of my deal.”

“You can’t do that,” Wyatt says after sucking in a surprised breath. “Amy’s gone because of something Homeland made us do. Jessica’s got nothing to do with them. They won’t go for it, and you need to fight for your sister.”

“But, Wyatt…”

“Lucy, no,” he says, dipping his head a little and meeting her pained eyes. He tries to pour all the sincerity he can into his face. “It means a lot to me that you’re willing to risk it, but I can’t let you. You and I and Rufus, we can keep trying little things on our own to see if we can put ripples in the right place in the pond to save Jess. But you’ll need more than that to get Amy back. We can’t go back to the Hindenberg. Someone needs to do a lot of research on your mom and dad’s timelines that they can cross-check with your memories, and you don’t have time for that and Rufus and I wouldn’t know where to start.” He flashes a small, quick smile that he knows doesn’t reach his eyes, but seems to reassure her anyway. “Get your deal with Homeland. We’ll figure something else out for me.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I wish I could help more.”

Wyatt reaches out and brushes his thumb across her cheekbone, drops his hand back to his side before he gives in to the temptation to pull her closer. “You are a remarkable human being, Lucy Preston.”

She smiles, and it lights up her face in a way that Wyatt does not want to admit draws him like a moth to a flame. They stand there looking at each other and not moving, until Lucy visibly shakes herself out of the moment and mutters something about needing to catch Agent Christopher before she leaves or ends up in some classified meeting somewhere.

“Hey, Lucy,” Wyatt calls out after she’s gone a few feet. She turns back to look at him, raising her eyebrows in lieu of actually replying. He feels uncharacteristically shy. “You wanna come over to my place after you finish with Christopher and see if the new-not-new Bond movie has magically appeared in my 50th Anniversary boxed set? We can order pizza,” he adds after checking his watch and finding that it’s vaguely a meal time.

Lucy smiles. “Sure,” she says. “I’d like that.”

Wyatt grins as she walks away. Things are certainly complicated between them, and likely to get more complicated before they get simple—if they _ever_ get simple. But the fact that Lucy not only understands but is willing to support his need to at least _try_ , for _real_ , to save Jess is more important to Wyatt than he’d realized it would be, even though he’d had to shoot down her offer to include saving Jess in her deal with Homeland. And though he isn’t ready yet to examine whatever feelings he has for Lucy too closely, he can at least safely admit he wants to spend time in her company. They are soulmates after all.

Wyatt decides he’ll think about his quest to save Jessica in the context of his growing relationship with Lucy later. Tonight is for enjoying some positive fruits of their labor.

Besides, he really wants to know if Fleming kept the detail where Lucy turned him down flat accurate or not.

=========

He did.

Lucy and Wyatt watch with a mix of embarrassment and fascination when they realize that Fleming had written the story as if Lucy and Wyatt had been a married team. It’s Lucy who breaks the tension when she turns to Wyatt as the credits roll and says, with a slightly studied nonchalance, “You know, movie you gave movie me a much better soul mark.”

Wyatt laughs so loudly his upstairs neighbor bangs on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! It's been a hectic first half of the semester, and frankly I'm still a little bit behind (my poor students never get anything graded in a reasonable amount of time tbh), but I've been tinkering with this fairly regularly ever since my last update. I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> The season finale of the show was amazing, and I'm so looking forward to continuing to offer my soulmate au interpretation of the series, especially now that I've such a great twist to look forward to/plant seeds for. Let's all cross our fingers and toes for a renewal!
> 
> If you're interested, I can be found ranting in the tags of posts about Timeless, the MCU, and feminist/anti-racist activism (with a sprinkling of other fandoms) on Tumblr, where my username is also surrexi. Feel free to follow me there if you'd like! (It will also give you an idea of how busy I've been, since you'll be able to tell if my queue has run out and I've not been on the site in days, lol.)


	4. the hardest part was letting go, not taking part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Time Team heads back to the Battle of the Alamo, Wyatt gets better at meeting his heroes, and he and Lucy continue to carefully build on and explore their relationship as soulmates and what it means to promise to be honest with each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am alive! And so is this fic! I have literally been writing and tinkering with and adding to this chapter since I last updated the fic, just... you know... _really slowly_. Further details in the endnotes, but... *waves* HI!
> 
> Continuing (largely just out of habit at this point) with the "titles from Coldplay songs" theme, this chapter's title comes from "The Hardest Part."
> 
> Also, it should be noted at some point that I use a decent amount of dialogue from the show, but I also change/add a lot. I have been using Forever Dreaming Transcripts for ease of reference for S1 episodes.

Wyatt turns on his television in time to catch the sports segment on the local news, decides to leave it on when he sees the teaser for Colbert’s guest lineup. It’s been a few days since Germany, since he and Lucy curled up on his couch to watch “their” Bond movie, since their laughter over it turned into a long conversation about everything and nothing that stretched into the night. They haven’t seen each other in person since, but they’re keeping up a steady stream of text messages. He’s just picked up his phone to text her about Colbert when the screen lights up and Agent Christopher’s name is displayed. He hits the button to accept the call.

“Flynn take out the mothership?” he asks in lieu of saying hello. He hears Christopher sigh.

“No, actually,” she says, and Wyatt’s stomach sinks a little. “But I need you to come in, if that’s all right.”

Wyatt closes his eyes. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“See you soon,” she says, and he wonders if he really hears regret in her tone or if he’s just projecting his own feelings onto her.

He shuts off the television, grabs his wallet and keys. He thinks about texting Lucy, but decides against it, on the off chance that Christopher calling him in the middle of the night to have him come in when there’s no mission _doesn’t_ mean he’s getting fired. All things considered, he doesn’t think he’s being conceited to assume that news of his firing will upset Lucy at least a little, and he supposes he’d rather break the news to her in person.

A short time later, he’s swiping his way into the restricted area of Mason Industries. As he tucks his access card back into his wallet, he wonders if they’re already printing one for whoever they’ve tagged as his replacement. He spots Rufus and Jiya at their desks (he wonders if they ever actually go home) and makes sure to avoid their lines of sight as he makes his way to the conference room that overlooks the landing dock.

As he approaches the conference room door, which stands ajar, he takes one last deep breath. Then he pushes through the doorway and finds Agent Christopher waiting with a nondescript middle aged guy whose entire demeanor screams _bureaucrat_ at Wyatt, and his heart drops into his stomach because he _knows_ he was right about why he was called in. Still, he keeps his voice carefully neutral when he speaks. “You wanted to see me, Agent Christopher?”

Christopher looks over at Wyatt at the sound of his voice and gives him a grim face he thinks was supposed to be a smile, though she’s clearly not pleased. “Thank you for coming in,” she says. “I know it’s late.”

He shrugs. It’s not like he really could have said no. But he supposes it’s nice for her to thank him anyway.

“This is Deputy Director Patrick Ramsey,” she adds, gesturing to Mr. Bureaucrat beside her. “My boss at the NCTC.”

Ramsey smiles, a politician’s smile, and reaches out to shake Wyatt’s hand. “Master Sergeant Logan, it’s an honor,” he says, giving Wyatt’s hand a practiced, measured squeeze and shake. “You’re a real war hero. We’ve all heard what you did in Syria.”

Wyatt shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, idly rubs a coin he finds in one between his fingers like a worry stone. “But you’re replacing me,” he says baldly. He’s not in the mood for bureaucratic beating around the bush, particularly not if it involves discussion of Syria or what a hero people seem to think Wyatt is. (He has enough nightmares, even now, without anyone actually bringing it up.)

Ramsey blinks at him, seems taken aback. “How’d you know?”

Wyatt shrugs again, gives a fatalistic grin. “Guys like you don’t show up except to get rid of guys like me. Sir.” The hitch in rhythm before he says “sir” is tiny, but from the way Ramsey’s face hardens it’s clear to Wyatt that he’d noticed it.

“The job is to kill Garcia Flynn,” Ramsey says, annoyance coloring his tone. “You just haven’t gotten it done. Maybe the next guy will.”

Wyatt’s jaw clenches and he has to consciously relax his fists, which are thankfully still in his jacket pockets. Wouldn’t do to reveal just how much he wants to punch his boss’ boss right now. (Former boss’ boss?) He shakes his head a little. “Who are you bringing in?” he finally asks, pointedly directing his question to Agent Christopher. If they pull from one of the other services’ special units chances are Wyatt won’t know them, but if it’s someone else from Delta Force, he might.

“Dave Baumgartner,” Christopher replies, voice flat.

“Bam Bam,” Wyatt murmurs, allowing himself a genuine smile. He supposes if he’s going to have to trust Lucy and Rufus’ safety to anyone besides himself, he’d choose someone like Bam Bam. “I served with him in Kandahar,” he says to Agent Christopher. “He’ll do a good job.” He glances down into the landing area, catches a glimpse of Rufus laughing at something Jiya has said or done. He looks back at Christopher. “I’d be happy to brief him if you’d like,” he says. _Please let me brief him, so I can tell him that Rufus is stronger than he thinks he is and Lucy is stubborn as hell and they’re both smart as whips and that despite all her brains Lucy still hasn’t figured out the Lifeboat seatbelts…_

“For what it’s worth,” Ramsey interjects, because apparently Wyatt’s disappointment and frustration is palpable even to a slick bureaucrat like him, “Agent Christopher fought like hell to keep you here.”

Wyatt smiles at Agent Christopher. “Thank you, ma’am,” he says, and despite the fact that pretty much everything she’d had him do since he was first called in has been insane, he’s still glad she chose him and grateful that she, at least, still wanted him for the job. “But I get it,” he adds, tries to keep his tone level if only to make sure Christopher doesn’t feel (too) guilty. “It’s a results-oriented business, and I haven’t delivered results.” _Other than getting Lucy and Rufus back here safely every time, of course,_ he thinks caustically.

Agent Christopher looks like she’s about to reply when there’s a flurry of activity in the computer area below. Wyatt turns on his heel and exits the conference room, Christopher and Ramsey right behind him. Jiya and Rufus are bustling back and forth between several computers and talking over each other in the direction of other Mason Industries techs about levels and readings and pinpointing things.

“What’s going on?” Agent Christopher calls out, voice authoritative over the din of activity.

Jiya looks up from the computer screen she’s leaning over, raises her voice so that they can hear her on the balcony. “Flynn’s gone,” she says. “To, uh… the second of March… 1836.” Something tickles in the back of Wyatt’s mind. “Looks like… near San Antonio,” she adds.

Wyatt’s eyes widen and turns to Agent Christopher, can’t keep the urgency out of his voice. “That’s just days before the Alamo,” he says.

She raises her eyebrows at him, doesn’t need to ask the obvious question.

“I’m from Texas,” he says, slightly impatiently. “We all know that one.”

Christopher shakes her head. “I’ll call Lucy,” she says with a sigh.

“When’s Baumgartner getting here?” Wyatt asks, and he doesn’t even want to _begin_ to sort out the reasons why he’s actually hoping it’s not quickly enough to go on this mission, finds himself glad that he legally cannot discuss his current job with his Army-appointed shrink because he’s sure that she’d have a significant number of thoughts on the issue.

“Not soon enough,” Agent Christopher says. She throws a loaded glance at Ramsey before looking back at Wyatt over her shoulder as she heads back into the conference room. “Looks like you’re going on one more trip after all.”

Wyatt nods. “I’ll try to make the best of it, ma’am,” he calls out after her. He shifts his gaze to Ramsey and gives him a curt nod, trying not to look smug. “Sir,” he says, then swiftly turns away to head toward the wardrobe area.

By the time Lucy arrives, Wyatt is already dressed for 1830s Texas, but he follows her to the wardrobe area anyway, thinks that maybe this would be a good time to tell her that this’ll be his last mission.

“You know,” she says before he can say anything, “I thought getting an official job title with Mason Industries would get my mom to stop bugging me about my inconsistent work schedule and about taking a leave of absence from Stanford.” Her movements as she sifts through the dresses on the rack are agitated, her expression pinched.

“I gather it hasn’t?” Wyatt asks, mentally tabling the issue of his own employment status.

Lucy shakes her head. “She actually asked me, explicitly, to violate the NDA I _told her_ that I signed and couldn’t break.” She pulls a dress off the rack and holds it up in front of her. “What do you think?”

Wyatt blinks. “Fashion’s not really my strong suit,” he hedges.

“I don’t like it either,” Lucy mutters, shoving it back onto the rack and continuing her search. “Mom keeps bringing up all these things she thinks I’m ignoring, and half the time I don’t even know what it is she’s talking about. When I was heading out the door tonight, she told me she thinks I’m throwing away everything I’ve ever worked for.”

Wyatt grimaces. “Harsh.”

Lucy pulls another dress off the rack and gives it a satisfied nod. “Better,” she murmurs. “She said the Lucy she raised is better than that. Has her whole life planned out.” Lucy looks up at Wyatt, and he can see pain and confusion in her eyes. “I told her I’m not that Lucy anymore.”

Wyatt smiles gently at her. “You’re exactly who you need to be,” he says confidently.

Lucy smiles. “I hope so.”

They smile at each other until the moment stretches out to _just_ too long. Wyatt rubs the back of his neck awkwardly and Lucy mutters something about getting changed, cheeks slightly pink.

Wyatt’s going to miss this, these quiet moments in corners of Mason Industries with Lucy, and considering that they only happen when they’re about to travel back in time and risk their lives, he’s pretty sure that makes him crazy. He thinks about Bam Bam sharing these pre-mission moments with Lucy instead, and that definitely makes him feel a little crazy.

Shaking his head ruefully, he makes his way down to the computer area and finds an already-kitted-out Rufus with Jiya, plotting out a landing area based on 1836 maps and their rough estimate of the location of the Mothership. He jumps in to veto one of their proposed sites because it’s too close to troop positions, and they both give him a surprised look.

“Texan,” he says, shrugging. He wanders over to a corner and methodically checks that his gun is loaded properly and adequately concealed beneath his historical clothing. Eventually, he catches sight of Lucy coming down the stairs. A corner of his mouth turns up in a smile as he takes in her outfit, the way she’s arranged her hair, the awkward way she carries the flat-brimmed hat that tells him she only has it because someone made her take it. Her hair is gathered up at the nape of her neck and held there by what Wyatt assumes is actual sorcery. He thinks he sees some braiding, but the whole thing looks loose and precarious, and he’s pretty sure that if things go as sideways on this trip as they usually do, it’ll all come tumbling down pretty quickly.

He picks up his bag of grenades and reminds himself that he should be concentrating on taking out Garcia Flynn, not the way Lucy looks when her face is framed by thin tendrils of hair that have escaped from a complicated hairdo or the way it makes his fingers itch to reach out and tuck the strands behind her ears.

=========

Lucy walks down the stairs to the computer bay, clutching the hat a wardrobe assistant with a drawl that reminded her of Wyatt when he was angry or talking about his childhood in Texas had thrust into her hands, reminding her there wasn’t any sunscreen in 1830s Texas. She scans the desks and sees Rufus and Jiya, heads bent together over Jiya’s computer. Rufus is already dressed. She spots Wyatt in the corner where he habitually stops to do a final weapons check—he’d figured out it was a security camera blind spot, therefore making it less likely that anyone who’d care about him taking modern handguns into the past would see him. There’s a knapsack next to him that she’s willing to bet has more than just a handgun in it, and wonders if it’s something she’ll genuinely object to him bringing or something she can shrug off the way she now finds herself shrugging off his sidearm.

He’s already watching her, she realizes, and the half-smile on his face makes her heart do a slow backflip, and _fuck_ , she is in _so much trouble_ , because given the amount of stuff they still have to work through (soulmates doesn’t mean it’s easy, after all), she really should be trying harder to retain some amount of distance and objectivity where Wyatt is concerned.

She smiles back at him, waves slightly with her free hand. _So… much… trouble._

In the pre-departure bustle, Agent Christopher pulls her aside to ask her an historical question and to check in with her regarding her cover story. She doesn’t get to speak with Rufus or Wyatt until they’re all in the Lifeboat and the door is closing.

Lucy’s first real clue that something is wrong with Wyatt is the fact that he doesn’t lean forward to help her with the complicated buckles and straps of her seatbelt. She’s watched him fasten both his and hers enough that she can manage them without his help, but she watches him closely as he busies himself with his knapsack.

(Grenades, she notices. Does she care about grenades at the Alamo? She considers all the ways things could go sideways and wonders if maybe she should start reading those speculative alternate history novels for practice combining historical warfare with modern weaponry.)

“So,” Rufus says with characteristic dry, false enthusiasm, “Alamo, huh? Don’t know about you guys but that was definitely on my bucket list.” He turns back toward the controls, flips some switches. “I mean, I’ve always been intrigued by the way the name has become totally synonymous with gory and inescapable death.”

Lucy winces, tightens her seatbelt unnecessarily.

“Wyatt,” Rufus says, glancing over his shoulder, “you wanna say something strong and reassuring?”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Wyatt says immediately, and Lucy finds his tone suspiciously flippant. “I just got fired,” he adds. Lucy sucks in a breath, only barely keeping from actually gasping, and Wyatt winces, meets her gaze guiltily.

“What?” Rufus asks, incredulous. Lucy hasn’t quite figured out what to say yet, but the thought of not having Wyatt sitting across from her every time they get into this time-traveling tin can anymore makes it feel like his words on her arm are formed with pins and needles.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, averting his eyes from Lucy’s and returning to shifting grenades around in his knapsack, doing whatever safety checks it is you do on grenades, Lucy supposes. “This’ll be my last mission.”

“How’d you get fired?” Rufus says, still looking over his shoulder. He turns back to the controls. “How do _I_ get fired?” he adds, muttering in a tone that mixes incredulity and curiosity.

Wyatt just grins over at Rufus, laughs a little. Lucy finally finds her voice. “You, ah… you seem pretty okay with this.”

Wyatt freezes, doesn’t look up to meet her eyes when he responds. “Yeah, well… I know the guy they’re bringing in to replace me.” He finally looks up and she can see in his eyes that he doesn’t feel nearly as blasé about it as he sounds. “He’s good. He’ll keep you safe.” He manages a wry grin. “You’ll like him better than me.”

Lucy narrows her eyes but otherwise doesn’t dignify that suggestion with an answer. He’s putting the last of his grenades back into the knapsack, and every time he stretches his arm out she can see the edge of his words peeking out from under his sleeve. She wonders if he’s looking at this as a way out, not just of the craziness that is their job, but also of the complexity that is their… thing.

Lucy waits until he’s almost done. “What if those go off in here?” she asks, and the look Wyatt shoots at her through his lashes makes her wonder what other questions he hears in the tone of her voice. She’s not really sure what else she’s asking, only that there’s a subtext here they both need to be mindful of.

“They won’t,” he says. He sounds like he did when he was talking her down from a panic attack in Nazi Germany. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Okay,” she says. But actually, now that she thinks about it, maybe she isn’t too sure about grenades at the Alamo. “Still, though… you’re bringing _grenades_. To the _Alamo_.”

He shuts and secures the top of the knapsack, safely tucks it between his seat and the Lifeboat wall. “Well,” he says, securing his seatbelt, “I’ve got one last shot at Flynn. I’m just trying to make the best of it.” He glances as Rufus, then catches Lucy’s eyes. “If I get him, you won’t _have_ to get fired to stop risking your lives over this. Besides,” he adds, shooting her a cocky grin, the one she finds frustrating and attractive in roughly equal measure. “What are they gonna do? Fire me?”

A muscle tics in Lucy’s jaw; _Wyatt_ might be ready to joke about him not being on the team anymore, but _Lucy_ certainly isn’t. Then they’re being sucked through time, the experience of which Lucy still hasn’t figured out how to describe, and a few stomach-churning moments later they arrive in 1836.

Wyatt jumps out of the Lifeboat first. He grabs his bag of grenades—and whatever else he’s tucked in there that Lucy doesn’t know about—and slings it over his shoulder before offering a hand to Lucy to steady her as she gets down. She accepts it, then doesn’t immediately let go. Instead, she gets close to him, squeezes his hand just enough to be painful. “We’re not done talking about this,” she whispers fiercely before drawing back to look him in the eye as she loosens her grip on his fingers.

“I know,” he says, voice low. He rubs his thumb over the back of her hand. “Trust me.”

Lucy pulls her hand away but nods. She _does_ trust him, implicitly and totally, and not just because they’re soulmates. She trusts him because he’s been there for her and Rufus across time. She doesn’t trust whoever it is he’ll be replaced by, no matter how well Wyatt knows him.

She feels unsettled, tells herself that it’s just from the time travel and because they’re about to walk up to the Alamo, four days before everyone there dies, and ask to hang out for a while. Rufus asks a history question, and Lucy feels steadier once she gets into the rhythm of a mini-lecture.

“So what does Flynn _want_?” Wyatt says, interjecting when Lucy hits a lull in her explanation of the situation in the fort. He stops walking to stare ahead, where they can see the fort, as well as scattered livestock and people surrounding it.

“I don’t know,” Lucy says, stopping beside him. It worries her that she has no real idea what Flynn’s plan might be. “To make it worse?”

“How do you make _the Alamo_ worse?” asks Rufus. He’s stopped next to Lucy.

“Whatever it is Flynn wants,” Wyatt mutters, “we just have to stop him.” Without turning to look at Lucy and Rufus, he strides ahead, picking up his pace.

“Oh sure,” Rufus says sarcastically as he and Lucy step quickly to catch up with Wyatt’s long, purposeful strides. “Easy. It’s always super easy to stop him. Nothing ever goes wrong when we try to stop him.”

Lucy shakes her head and thinks about all the variables. _Too damn many variables._

=========

Wyatt scans the groups of people bustling around in the open area in the interior of the fort. There’s groups of soldiers—some clearly far less trained than others—shoring up defenses, melting lead over small fires to make bullets, sharpening swords and knives. But others—too many others—are clearly civilians arriving from the surrounding area, hoping for refuge.

“I expected soldiers,” he says, voice low, eyeing Lucy’s reactions to gauge whether or not anything’s surprised her yet. He thinks back to the IMAX film his grandfather had taken him to see the same day they’d visited the Alamo itself while visiting one of his grandfather’s World War II buddies in San Antonio, but he had only been nine or so, and the details are hazed with time. All he remembers is that he and his friends had pretended to be Alamo defenders for weeks after he’d come home brimming with stories about the brave fighters, and that he had always played Jim Bowie, clutching the plastic Bowie knife he’d bought himself in the Alamo gift shop using his saved-up chore money.

(He is absolutely not going to react to Jim Bowie the way he reacted to Ian Fleming. He has learned from that experience and this time he is _prepared_ and he will be _totally chill_ , even though he was raised on tales of the man’s heroic deeds.)

He realizes that Lucy and Rufus have started talking about the people in the fort while Wyatt has been letting his mind wander. Mentally chastising himself for losing focus, he resumes his careful scanning of the people around them, listens with half an ear as Rufus expresses his appreciation of Mexico’s lack of slavery. He almost smiles, but then he spots someone he is _pretty_ sure he recognizes from his fourth grade history book, though admittedly his mental image of the man is a blending of his actual face and several men who’ve played him in films. He nudges Lucy’s shoulder and points out the man to her. “That’s gotta be him,” he says.

She looks over, nods. “That’s Bowie.” With a nod at Rufus to indicate he should keep looking around, Wyatt and Lucy head towards Bowie. “Let me do the talking,” she asks, and Wyatt raises his eyebrows but doesn’t object. He is technically the worst at cover stories, after all, even if it is mostly because he lacks the patience to come up with them.

Lucy gets Bowie’s attention, introduces herself and Wyatt, and he spares a moment to be grateful she uses their real names. He’s got too much to concentrate on right now without having to remember an alias on top of everything else.

(He keeps his face neutral when he shakes Jim Bowie’s hand. His inner nine-year-old is awestruck, though.)

Lucy is clearly taken aback when Bowie mentions he’s got family in the city she claimed they’d come from, and Wyatt can tell that it’s derailed her train of thought by the way she scrambles to come up with a reason they wouldn’t know Bowie’s family. Instinctively, he rests his hand on the small of her back, not as a gesture of control but rather of comfort.

“Look,” he says, slightly increasing the pressure of his hand on Lucy’s back in a silent apology for interrupting her. “We’re looking for a guy.” Bowie’s attention is sharply focused on Wyatt now, and he finds it unnerving. This guy was a _badass_ , and for a guy Wyatt’s pretty sure was supposedly bedridden at this point he looks pretty hale and hearty, and Wyatt can see a hint of suspicion in the man’s eyes that he doesn’t want to let fester. “Tall guy,” Wyatt continues, letting some of the West Texas accent he usually suppresses slip back into his voice while keeping his cadence businesslike, addressing Bowie soldier to soldier. “Dark hair, accent… name is Garcia Flynn.”

The suspicion in Bowie’s eyes is now mixed with confusion. “What? I’m sorry, I…”

“He’s a Mexican sympathizer,” Lucy says quickly, shooting a sideways glance in Wyatt’s direction that lets him know she thinks he’s pushed too hard, too quickly.

Wyatt’s frustration, his need to _get to Flynn, stop Flynn, keep Lucy and Rufus safe for once and for all_ colors his tone as he steamrolls over Lucy’s explanation and Bowie’s confusion. “This guy might have already infiltrated the fort,” he says, impatient. “He’s very dangerous and could be planning some kind of sabotage. Have you seen him?”

Bowie looks back and forth between Lucy and Wyatt, and it’s clear to Wyatt that the man isn’t entirely sure what to make of them, but recognizes something about them that has him inclined to believe them. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “But I will ask around.”

Wyatt nods tightly. “Okay.”

Bowie shifts, nods at Lucy and gives her a polite tip of the hat. “Ma’am,” he says, then walks away, shaking his head slightly.

“Thank you kindly,” Lucy calls out after him.

“Do I sound like that to you?” he asks curiously, momentarily distracted from his frustration by the way she’d elongated her vowels as she spoke to Bowie.

“What?”

“My accent,” Wyatt clarifies as they turn to scan the courtyard for Rufus. “Is that what I sound like?”

“Oh,” Lucy says, shaking her head slightly. “Not really, except when you get really angry, or the other night when you were telling me about growing up with your grandpa.”

“Huh,” Wyatt says thoughtfully. Then he catches sight of Rufus and heads towards him.

“Don’t you think you came on a little strong there?” Lucy asks as she follows him. “I just… I don’t want to freak him out.”

Wyatt shrugs, his frustration returning in full force. “We don’t have time to play cowboy,” he grits out.

“Wyatt, if this is about…”

“This is about me doing my job, Lucy.” Wyatt shoots her a hard look as they continue across the courtyard to the small gathering of men that Rufus has joined. “This is about me focusing on the mission, so that I can take out Flynn and keep you safe. You _and_ Rufus,” he adds.

“Wyatt…”

“Not now,” Wyatt insists as they approach Rufus, who is grinning at… Davy Crockett. Davy _fucking_ Crockett. Wyatt ruthlessly controls the excited nine-year-old doing a happy dance in his heart, though he can’t help but soften (just a little bit) at the delight in Lucy’s tone when she whispers to Rufus about Crockett. He steels himself, hisses at them both about not being tourists, and declares that they’re splitting up and looking for Flynn separately.

As he trudges toward one of the battered stone buildings inside the fort, the desert sand of the courtyard reminds him less of the carefully-maintained grass and gravel pathways that greet Alamo visitors in the future, and more of _other_ deserts where he’s spent time. He tries to shake off the thoughts of Afghanistan, of Syria. But when he gets into the building, the present-in-the-past and the past-in-the-future overlap in his mind’s eye. In front of him are broken crosses, toppled boxes, a stone floor covered in Texas dust. He sees them, but he also sees a dim room with low tables, piles of increasingly-useless gear, and his team, his _brothers_ , solemnly drawing lots.

He staggers backwards, blinks, tries to bring the Alamo back into focus. He’s breathing heavily now, feels a trickle of cold sweat slide down the middle of his back. “No,” he rasps out, feeling suddenly in need of about a gallon of water.

He blinks again, and now one of his buddies is holding out the hard plastic case that haunts his nightmares for everything it represents. He can hear modern gunfire, modern war machines. He can hear his own heart pounding and his friend wishing him luck.

He can hear Lucy.

“Wyatt,” she’s saying, and as he blinks himself back to reality he thinks from her tone that she’s probably said his name more than once.

“Lucy,” he says, turning around to see her stepping hesitantly toward him. Something in the tone of his voice, which he’s sure sounds ragged, has her bridging the gap. She stops just in front of him, doesn’t touch him at first.

“Hey,” she says, softly. “Rufus and I aren’t having any luck. Guess you aren’t either?”

He shakes his head. “No. We have to keep looking.” He shifts, preparing to step around her to leave the building, but she reaches out and takes his hand.

“You okay?” she asks, squeezing his hand gently. “I can tell you’re upset about getting fired, you know, but is there anything else?”

Wyatt swallows, shakes his head. “I’m fine, Luce.”

She tilts her head like she’s evaluating him, like she can read the truth in his eyes or in the way he’s set his jaw.

“You helped me,” she says softly. “In Germany. You helped me… get over the hump. If you… found yourself in front of a new hump…” She winces slightly at the awkwardness of the phrasing, which almost makes Wyatt smile. “Or whatever,” she continues, “I’m here for you, too.”

His instinct is to deny, to insist that nothing’s wrong, but this is _Lucy_ , and she’s his _soulmate_ , and he can’t lie to her like that. He squeezes her hand lightly, lets go long enough to move his hand and lace his fingers with hers. “I know,” he acknowledges. He leans forward and rests his forehead against hers, wary of anything else because what they have still seems so uncertain and so fragile despite the words on their skin, but somehow _needing_ the contact. “I know you are, and if we had the luxury of time right now, I promise I would explain. But right now the priority is finding Flynn and getting the hell out of here.”

He pulls back a little, meets her gaze. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get home, okay? Pizza and drinks at my place?”

She looks steadily into his eyes for a moment, nods. “Okay.”

He lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, leans his forehead against hers again. The words on his wrist feel pleasantly warm, grounding him in the moment. “Whatever happens with us,” he whispers, “however complicated it gets or however much I fuck it up… I’m really glad we found each other.”

“Me too,” Lucy says, and she sounds sincere but also maybe a little confused by his abrupt shift of mood. She leans back, and Wyatt meets her eyes. The moment stretches, much like their earlier _moment_ in the wardrobe area, until Wyatt takes a deliberate step back and drops her hand. This isn’t the time (in more ways than one), and it _definitely_ isn’t the place.

“We should keep looking,” he says. She nods wordlessly and heads back out into the sunlight. Wyatt glances back into the dusty room, but now all he sees is the broken crosses and toppled boxes. He shakes his head and wishes he could leave the ghosts of his future-past as easily as he can leave the room.

=========

By the time night falls, they still haven’t found Flynn. Lucy and Rufus sit by a small campfire while Wyatt paces next to them. Lucy is still worried about his state of mind but thinks that pushing the issue will only make it worse. She wishes he’d sit down.

A gunshot, from somewhere inside the fort, rips through the night, startling Lucy and Rufus so that they each nearly drop the mugs of coffee that had been pressed into their hands at some point. Wyatt is sprinting in the direction of the noise before Lucy has even really processed what she’s just heard.

Lucy scrambles to her feet, dimly aware that Rufus is close behind her as she hurries off after Wyatt.

“He’s dead,” she hears Bowie say as she skids to a stop in the doorway of a dimly-lit office. He and another man are leaning over a man’s motionless body. Lucy can’t quite see his face, but a glance around the office has her worried. There’s something tickling at the back of her mind…

“I guess the man you warned us about probably did this?” Bowie says, and it’s both a statement and a question somehow.

Wyatt nods. “I think so, sir,” he says. His voice is steady. “I’ll find him. I promise.”

“Not if we find him first,” Bowie mutters darkly, rising to his feet. He gestures to the other man with him. “Come on,” he says, and heads for the door. He nods perfunctorily to Lucy as he passes her. “Ma’am.”

She nods at him in return, starts to step more fully into the room. Wyatt strides over to her and grabs her elbow. “That gunshot came from a semi-automatic,” he whispers fiercely. “Flynn was _right here_.” The futile anger in his voice makes Lucy wince. He drops her arm and slips past her and Rufus without another word. She and Rufus exchange loaded glances as they step further into the room.

Rufus glances around. “What the hell happened?” he asks, bewildered and concerned.

Lucy steps over to the body and finally gets a good look at the man’s face. It only takes her a moment to match it to her mental roster of historical figures present at the Alamo. “That’s Colonel Travis,” she says slowly. “He was supposed to die in battle in four days, not now.” She glances around the office, Travis’ gun lying next to him on the floor. “Not like this,” she adds sadly.

“If he was gonna die anyway, then why did Flynn do it?” Rufus asks.

Lucy shakes her head, steps carefully around Travis’ body to look down at the desk. She’s trying to recall the timeline of events in more detail, is toying with the idea of trying to get Wyatt to stop obsessing about Flynn long enough to pick his Texan military brain about it, when her gaze tracks over a piece of parchment with just a few phrases scrawled at the top. “Oh _shit_ ,” she whispers.

“What?”

“The letter.”

Rufus looks like he’s about to ask for clarification, but Lucy grabs the parchment and hurries outside, folding the letter and tucking it in her pocket as she goes. She only wants to explain once, so she wants to find Wyatt.

She scans the crowd of people milling around in the courtyard of the fort, looking for Wyatt. Moments later, she hears him shout her name, locates him as he jumps down past the last few rungs on one of the crude ladders that lead up to the top of the fort’s walls.

“Something’s wrong,” he says when she reaches him, and tugs her towards the ladder. “I don’t remember the details as well as you do, but I’ve seen enough Alamo movies to know that what’s happening out there is wrong,” he adds.

“What are you talking about?”

“Santa Anna,” he says. “The army’s already here.”

“What?” Lucy glances at the wall as if she could see through it. “That’s not how it happens!”

“See for yourself,” Wyatt responds, gesturing at the ladder.

Lucy scrambles up to the top of the wall and gasps at the sight of Santa Anna’s full army. “Shit,” she mutters. A rider carrying a red flag gallops past, and Lucy’s stomach sinks to her feet. “Oh, _fuck_ ,” she says. _Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit_ , she thinks as she makes her way down the ladder. Rufus and Wyatt are waiting at the bottom.

“It’s a red flag,” she says tersely. Wyatt immediately curses under his breath and turns away, though he only takes a few steps.

“What’s a red flag mean?” Rufus asks, glancing worriedly at Wyatt before focusing on Lucy.

“It means no quarter,” she says seriously. “No prisoners. Execute anyone who tries to surrender… which is _not_ supposed to happen, by the way.” She shakes her head. “Santa Anna was _supposed_ to let the women and children go free. This is all wrong!”

“What do you mean?” Rufus asks.

“There’s an army out there that’s not supposed to get here for _three days_ ,” Lucy answers, trying to keep her voice even. “And they’re waving a red flag when they’re supposed to let the women and children go.” Feeling helpless, she shrugs. “Flynn must have found a way to change it.”

“But why?”

“It must have something to do with the letter.”

“What _letter_?” Rufus asks, starting to sound frustrated.

Lucy reaches into her pocket and pulls out Travis’ letter, unfolds it. “Travis’ famous ‘Victory or Death’ letter,” she says, holding it up. She holds it out to Rufus, who takes it after a moment. “It was reprinted in newspapers all over the country. It’s one of the biggest reasons we remember the Alamo, it’s why Sam Houston was able to defeat Santa Anna a few weeks from now…”

“It’s only two sentences,” Rufus says flatly.

Lucy snatches it back. “Exactly. Because Flynn killed Travis before he could finish it.”

“So… no letter, no Texas?”

Lucy nods, looks over at Wyatt. He’s still standing with his back to her and Rufus, hasn’t moved since he turned away from them in the first place. Her earlier concern wars with annoyance at how he’s disengaged. “Wyatt, are you even listening?” Her voice comes out harsher than she intended, but it gets a reaction.

“All of that,” he says, without turning. “ _And_ Flynn manages to trap us in the Alamo.” He pauses, laughs in a way that makes Lucy wince even though she can’t see his face. “Gotta hand it to him,” he adds bitterly.

Lucy makes an effort to soften her voice. “Wyatt, I know you want Flynn. I know why it’s important to you, I get it.” She takes a hesitant step toward him, but doesn’t reach out. “But Rufus and I need you with us now. More than we need you to get Flynn.” He doesn’t move. “Wyatt, please.”

Something in her tone must get through to him, because after a tense moment he turns, and though she can tell he’s still thinking about Flynn, some of the intense focus he gets during the sticky parts of their missions has come back into his eyes. He doesn’t look at her though, turns to Rufus instead. “Rufus, you need to find a way out.”

Rufus’ eyes widen. “A way out?” he repeats incredulously. “There’s two things _everybody_ knows about the Alamo,” he says. “One, _everybody dies_. Two, they die because _there’s no way out_.”

Wyatt flashes a quick grin. “The Alamo didn’t have anyone as smart as you,” he says, and Lucy can’t imagine that anyone they could find to replace Wyatt would understand so well or so quickly just how much substance there was behind Rufus’ nervous tension, let alone display so much faith in him. “Figure it out,” Wyatt continues. “ _Make_ a way if you have to. We have to get the women and the children out.” He finally looks at Lucy, and somehow what she sees in his face is both comforting and concerning, but she doesn’t know why. “Same with the letter,” he says.

Lucy sighs. “I told you, Travis didn’t finish it.”

“Then finish it for him,” Wyatt says, sounding implacable and utterly confident in her ability to do what he’s asking. She is very much _not_ confident in that.

He glances over his shoulder to where Jim Bowie is talking with some of his men around a nearby campfire. “I’m going to try to buy us some time,” he says. There’s a light in his eyes that worries Lucy, especially when she remembers how pushy he was earlier. She mutters a suggestion for Rufus of a relatively quiet place to go think things through, but lingers when he leaves, watching Wyatt and Bowie.

At first, Wyatt speaks too softly for her to hear, especially since his back is to her, but she can see from Bowie’s face that he doesn’t like what he’s hearing. He shakes his head, says something in a placating and slightly dismissive tone that has Wyatt stiffening his back and raising his voice. As his volume increases, the men Bowie had been talking to clearly start listening, and Bowie’s face darkens. Lucy hears the name Santa Anna and steps toward Wyatt.

“… he’s gonna come over this wall,” Wyatt is saying, and Lucy stops in her tracks, thinks, _dammit, Wyatt_. “And in twenty minutes, you’ll all be dead!” Wyatt finishes, nearly shouting.

“Wyatt!” Lucy finally yells, breaking out the angry professor voice she generally only uses when there’s students in the back of the lecture hall who’ve been talking since the beginning of her lecture when they’re halfway through class or she catches students blatantly cheating on a test.

Wyatt flinches ever so slightly, but doesn’t turn to look at her. Voice barely lower and possibly more intense, he finishes, “So we need to get the women and children out.”

There’s a hushed moment where no one moves or even breathes, then Bowie gets up in Wyatt’s face and mutters something Lucy can’t hear. Wyatt says nothing in response, simply turns and stalks away. As he passes Lucy, she starts to reach out, says his name, but he just shakes his head.

“I can’t right now, Lucy,” he says as he passes.

Feeling annoyingly helpless, Lucy watches him head in the direction of the outer wall, then looks down at the barely-started letter in her hands.

“Victory or death,” she murmurs darkly, and heads toward Travis’ office.

=========

Wyatt passes the night with little sleep, alternating between checking on Lucy and Rufus, who eventually fall asleep in the relative safety of Travis’ office (Rufus is slumped in a corner surrounded by hastily-scrawled maps of the fort and its buildings, Lucy appears to have fallen asleep in the middle of writing a word and from the looks of it only narrowly avoided getting ink stains on her cheek when she slumped over), and prowling around the fort looking for weaknesses, assessing strengths, and trying to figure out a way to buy Rufus and Lucy more time.

Shortly before dawn, Santa Anna’s army begins playing music and Wyatt grimaces, not because of the music itself but because he knows what it means. “We need more _time_ ,” he mutters, and desperately tries not to think about another time he was trapped, surrounded by the enemy, and needed more time.

Wyatt heads back to Travis’ office and rouses Lucy and Rufus. Lucy shakes herself, accepts the campfire-brewed coffee Wyatt offers, and resumes staring at the parchment in front of her with a quill held loosely between her fingers. Rufus mutters something about needing a change of scene to think, and stalks out into the morning sunlight.

“Did you get any sleep?” Lucy asks, quill hovering over the paper.

Wyatt tries to keep his face neutral. “Yeah, some.”

Lucy narrows her eyes, sets the quill back in its inkwell. “Liar,” she says plainly.

Wyatt blinks at her; it’s not that he’s surprised she’s either guessed or can just tell so much as that he didn’t expect her to call him on it. It’s not as if he’s going to lie down and take a nap now. Even if Lucy hasn’t realized the significance of the music yet, she knows that the timeline of events has been accelerated just based on what Santa Anna had done the night before.

“What would you have me do, Lucy?”

“Get some rest,” she says, in a tone that suggests she thinks it’s ridiculous he hasn’t.

“I’ve gone longer with less,” he says dismissively, choosing not to mention that it was before he ended up with PTSD, trapped behind a desk and considered expendable enough to send on near-impossible missions into the _past_.

Lucy makes a derisive noise.

“It’s too late now, anyway,” Wyatt says quietly. “We don’t have much time left.”

“Wyatt…”

“Just finish the letter, Lucy.”

She opens her mouth to reply, but before she can say anything, Rufus comes rushing back in, grabs one of his maps off the floor, and lays it out on the desk.

“Great news,” he says. “This aqueduct goes from the fort to the river,” he traces the route on the map, “here.”

Lucy looks up at Rufus and Wyatt, a hopeful gleam in her eyes for the first time in hours. “That’s right,” she says, and Wyatt can practically see the filing cabinet in her brain opening to give her the information she needs. “There was an aqueduct system running throughout this entire area. It was built, oh, forty-some years before now.”

Rufus nods. “If we can get in, we can sneak the civilians out. And the letter. And us,” he adds after a beat.

“Sounds great,” Wyatt says, though he has a terrible feeling that there’s a ‘but’ coming.

“The only problem is we can only access it through a hole the size of a softball, in the chapel, under about three feet of stone.”

Lucy visibly deflates and Wyatt feels his heart sink into his stomach. “This is starting to sound a lot less like great news, Rufus.” Rufus shrugs. Shaking his head, Wyatt turns back to Lucy. “How’s the letter coming?” he asks.

She grimaces, and Wyatt braces for more bad news. “It’s not,” she admits. “The last time I had writer’s block this bad I was dissertating.” She sighs. “I know there’s something about… patriotism and liberty… the American character… I think.”

“You don’t _know_?” Rufus asks, incredulous. “You’re the historian!”

“Believe it or not,” Lucy snaps, “I was not required to memorize every letter ever written in the history of time in order to get my PhD. And this one… it’s important. Every word. If I don’t get them exactly right…”

“It’s just a letter,” Wyatt says, impatient.

“It’s not _just a letter_ ,” Lucy insists. “It’s the letter that _created Texas_. You of all people should appreciate that.”

Wyatt rolls his eyes, curses under his breath. “For God’s sake, Lucy, get out of your own head and just _write something_.” Her eyes widen at his tone, and if he weren’t so frustrated with the job, and with Flynn, and with his own emotional mess, he’d feel a bit guilty. He is all those things, though, so he forges ahead. “Write anything. It doesn’t have to be exact.”

“Oh,” Lucy says, rising to her feet. Out of the corner of his eye, Wyatt sees Rufus actually take a step backwards, and it’s only the fact that Lucy is still speaking, doing that thing with her voice that only mothers and teachers seem to be capable of, where they don’t yell but still somehow manage to infuse their voice with enough intensity that you are convinced you’re being yelled at, that keeps Wyatt from chuckling at Rufus. “I can just say whatever I want,” she says, gesturing widely with her arm. “Like you did with Bowie and his men last night? How’d that work out for you, Wyatt?”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t _matter_. Quit pretending and just say something. Forget playing dress-up and making up stories. This isn’t grade school drama!”

“That’s the job! That is _literally_ my job!”

“The job is Flynn,” Wyatt retorts, and now he _is_ yelling. He slams his fist on the table for emphasis. Rufus flinches and Lucy gets that sharp look in her eyes again, the one that says she knows there’s more going on under the surface than Wyatt’s willing to admit. “I can’t do my job with all this crap,” he adds. He runs his fingers through his hair and sighs agitatedly, turning to give Lucy a plaintive look at odds with the anger in his voice. “How am I supposed to do my job with my hands tied behind my back?”

“Wyatt…”

He shakes his head. “Maybe they’re right to fire me,” he mutters, turning away from his teammates. “Maybe I’m not the guy for the job.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room is the muted sound of the Mexican army’s music coming through the walls. Wyatt closes his eyes, tries to center himself. He can’t do his job if he lets his frustration and anger overwhelm him, either. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, glancing between Lucy and Rufus to include them both.

Any reply they may have come up with is drowned out by explosions and the sounds of cannonball impacts, crumbling masonry, and shouting in the courtyard. Wyatt springs into action, running towards the chaos without a second thought. There’s more shouting, more cannon fire, and Lucy’s voice calling his name, and machine gun fire in a different desert echoing in his ears. As he fights to pull a young boy from the rubble created by the explosion, flashbacks of Syria seem to merge with what he’s actually seeing, and for a terrifying moment he has no idea which of the scenes is reality.

He shakes himself out of it, muffles a curse under his breath, and finishes rescuing the boy. He’s impressed by how calm the boy is, tells him so, then feels shitty when he only seems to make things worse by bringing up the boy’s father, who it turns out was killed by Santa Anna’s army. Wyatt lays his hand on the back of the boy’s neck, the way his own grandfather used to when he was getting skinned knees or sore pride patched up as a child, in an awkward attempt to provide comfort.

He knows Rufus is in the chapel trying to figure out how to get down to the aqueduct, and when he leaves the building where the boy is being seen to, he spots Lucy sitting in a shady spot with some of the other women, tearing fabric into strips for bandages. She glances at him before returning her attention to her work and to the women she’s sitting with.

Wyatt can’t sit around doing nothing, and he figures neither Rufus nor Lucy is particularly interested in his help, so he gets his hands on a small hatchet and a bundle of large sticks. He picks a spot near Lucy, close enough that she can easily get his attention if she wants it, and sets to work sharpening the ends of the sticks.

After a while, a shadow falls over him and he looks up to find Jim Bowie looking down at him. “I appreciate you pulling young John out from under that wall,” he says. “You saved his life,” he adds.

Wyatt shrugs. “Anyone would’ve done the same,” he says dismissively, pointedly returning to working on sharpening the stick. Even before Syria, Wyatt wasn’t comfortable being called a hero—some guys in the service, he knew, ate up that kind of attention, but not Wyatt. He was just doing what he figured was necessary given his skill set, like his grandfather had done in a different war. Now, after Syria, Wyatt _hates_ to be called a hero.

Bowie has apparently seen enough of war to recognize something of this in Wyatt’s tone, because he doesn’t press him further. He glances out at the walls, sighs heavily as the music from the Mexican army continues to blare on the other side.

“We’re not gonna make it,” he finally says, and Wyatt stops working again. “You were right,” Bowie adds. “Fannin ain’t coming. There’ll be no reinforcements for us, and meanwhile Santa Anna’s are just about here. Like you said they’d be.” He shakes his head. “Won’t be long now.”

There’s a lot of things that drive Wyatt nuts about time travel, but this business of knowing the bad things that will happen to people and then having to watch them make peace with it? That’s definitely one of his least favorite things. “I don’t like being right. I wish to God I could get everyone out of here but I don’t know how.” Wyatt shifts his weight a little, looks Bowie in the eye. “I do think I can get the women and children out, though.”

“Through the aqueduct,” Bowie says. “Crockett saw your man in the chapel, banging away at the floor,” he adds at Wyatt’s raised eyebrow.

Wyatt nods, summons his most confident tone. “Rufus’ll figure something out.” Once the words are out of his mouth, Wyatt is surprised by how much he really does believe them. Though his rational side tells him it’s impossible, he’s seen Rufus pull off amazing things, and he has faith that the man who dug a bullet out of Wyatt’s side can dig them a way out of the Alamo. “But we gotta buy him time,” he adds, squinting up at Bowie and trying to look as sincere as possible.

Bowie looks around the fort, and Wyatt holds his breath as he waits for the man’s decision.

“I guess you oughta tell me how we’re gonna do that, then,” Bowie finally says.

=========

As Wyatt begins to explain his plan to buy time to Bowie, Lucy tunes out the occasional murmurs from the other women and listens intently to Wyatt’s voice as she methodically tears bandages. Though she’s never specialized in military history, she knows enough to recognize a bottleneck strategy before Wyatt utters the word. Her smooth, purposeful movements falter when she hears Bowie’s response to Wyatt’s summation of the plan.

“You’ve done this before.”

Lucy looks up in time to catch Wyatt’s tiny affirmative nod.

“Where?” Bowie asks.

Wyatt shakes his head. “Far away from here.” He looks down at the ground, glances back over at the walls of the compound. “It was a lot like this, though. Pinned down, outnumbered, outgunned. I was the only one who made it out.”

Lucy’s stomach sinks, and everything he’s done that she’d been unable to explain away with just his frustration over getting fired suddenly makes sense. She can only see Wyatt’s profile, but she can’t look away, can’t go back to tearing bandages as a way to occupy her hands while thinking through the problem of the letter.

She watches him, catalogs every clench of his jaw, every time he closes his eyes as if trying to keep from seeing his memories. She strains to hear every word, doesn’t want to make him repeat the story later.

“He said I was meant to survive,” Wyatt says, tone both derisive and disbelieving. “You know, like it was fate.” He scoffs. “As if that’s a thing.”

Lucy winces, resists the urge to rub at her soul mark, reminds herself that she’s heard him talk this way about fate before, actually in the context of soulmates even, and that if anything, this adds to her understanding of why he’s so resistant to the idea of fate or destiny.

“I left them there to die,” Wyatt is saying, brokenly, “and they gave me a medal.” Lucy’s pain for him eclipses her own pain. She finds herself clenching her fists, barely breathing, as she waits to hear Bowie’s decision. She closes her eyes briefly in a silent prayer of thanks when he shouts for Crockett and begins to give orders that carry out Wyatt’s plan. She opens them to find Wyatt looking at her over his shoulder, eyes haunted.

She nods, ever so slightly, tries to look supportive or reassuring or something like that without actually smiling. Whatever Wyatt sees in her face, it at least doesn’t make him look worse. He turns away, pushes to his feet, and without looking back again, goes to help Bowie and Crockett make defensive arrangements.

Lucy tears another bandage, turning the last few moments over in her mind, when the solution to her letter problem appears, practically fully-formed, in her mind. With a quick apology to the women she’d been working with, she drops the fabric and hurries back to Travis’ office.

This time, the words flow freely, easier than anything she’s ever written. She thinks, she _feels_ , like she’s blended the best of Travis’ letter with the best of what she’s learned from their various travels in time, from her teammates. She hesitates a moment when she finishes the letter. There’s no point signing as Travis—it will be clear to anyone that he didn’t write it, whether they check the handwriting or evaluate the style. Her name will mean nothing to anyone in this time.

“Defenders of the Alamo?” she says, testing the way it sounds. It’s good, but she thinks about the women she’d sat with, tearing bandages and comforting children, preparing food and tending fires. She smiles tightly, a determined glint in her eyes. With a flourish, she signs the bottom of the letter— _the men and women of the Alamo_.

After taking a moment to set the ink, she folds her finished letter and tucks it into her pocket. She’s just making her way out into the courtyard to find someone to entrust with the letter—preferably the boy who was supposed to take Travis’ letter in the first place, if she can find him—when all hell breaks loose.

She helps the other women gather the children and escort them to the most sheltered point they can find, tries to keep them as calm as possible. She nearly screams with relief when Rufus appears and tells her he’s managed to get them access to the aqueduct. They usher the women towards the chapel, but Lucy is acutely aware that Wyatt did not come in with Rufus, which means he must still be in the thick of the fighting.

“I’m going to get Wyatt!” she yells at Rufus. Without waiting for a response, she turns and rushes out into the chaos of the courtyard. Through the haze of smoke and dust, she spots him sheltering behind debris as he reloads his gun.

“Wyatt!” she shouts, rushing towards him. Bullets hit the dirt around her feet as she runs, and she finds herself literally diving for the safety of Wyatt’s debris pile.

“Lucy?” he shouts, incredulous.

“Rufus did it!” She instinctively huddles closer to Wyatt as gunfire erupts behind them. Wyatt pops up, takes a couple shots with his modern handgun, and crouches back down, fumbling to reload. He hasn’t looked at her, and Lucy starts to feel panicky. “Wyatt! There’s a way out, we have to go!” The dust beside her explodes, and a bullet ricochets past her shoulder. She lets out a surprised scream, inches closer to Wyatt. “We have to go, _now_ ,” she yells, tugging at Wyatt’s sleeve. He’s still not looking at her, still messing with his sidearm, and she screams his name, grabs at his wrist, thumb pressing into the words there. His eyes, slightly wild, meet hers. “Wyatt?”

“I’m not going,” he says, voice hoarse. He tugs his arm out of her suddenly slack grip, gets off another shot before taking cover from the return fire.

“No!” she shouts, and she’s definitely panicky now. “What the hell do you mean you’re _not going_?” She grabs both his hands now, refuses to let go.

“You don’t need me,” he says, refusing to meet her eyes. “They’re getting rid of me anyway.”

Lucy shakes her head earnestly. “You can’t stay here,” she insists. “Everyone _dies_ , Wyatt!” She squeezes his hands so hard she knows without looking that her knuckles must be turning white.

“I know!” he says. He shakes his head, gives her a plaintive look. “These are good men,” he says. “I can’t leave them. Not again.”

Lucy feels her eyes widen, is suddenly afraid that nothing she can say will change his mind. “No. No, no, no, Wyatt.”

“What _difference_ does it make?” he asks, and the naked pain in his voice burns in Lucy’s chest. “My family, Jessica, _everyone_ back home is _gone_. There’s only you, Lucy.” This time it’s him that reaches out and touches her soul mark, glancing at it before finally, _finally_ meeting her eyes. His are unfocused and clouded, like they were earlier when he was talking about his past and when she’d found him while they were looking for Flynn. “Let me do this for you, Lucy. Let me do this one good thing, and buy you the time to get out.”

Though the battle continues to rage around them, the noise and chaos seem to fade in Lucy’s perception as her entire focus centers on the bubble of space around her and Wyatt. “No,” she whispers. “Wyatt, no,” she says, voice strengthening. “We need you with us. We count on you,” she adds, making it clear she’s not just talking about now, but about the next mission, the one after that.

“The next guy will handle it,” he says dismissively, and this, Lucy will think later, is the last straw, because she pictures someone who isn’t Wyatt sitting across from her in the lifeboat, someone who isn’t Wyatt expecting her to trust him to have her back, and she _cannot_ accept it.

“No,” she shouts, dropping Wyatt’s hands only to grab his face, to _make_ him look at her, _really_ look at her. “I don’t _want_ anybody else!” She shakes him to punctuate her words. “I want _you_ ,” she says. “I _trust_ you. _You_ are the person I trust to buckle my seatbelt and cover my back.” She scans his face, trying to see if she’s having any effect. “Rufus needs you,” she reminds him, “and _I need you_. I _need_ you, Wyatt.”

She doesn’t even breathe, until that reassuring clarity she’s come to depend on seeps back into his gaze. “Okay?” she asks, an edge of desperation in her tone.

“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Okay.” She drops her hands from his face and he looks around, looks back to her and takes her hand. “Get ready to run,” he shouts.

She nods, and the next few moments are a blur of chaotic running, gunfire, and shouts. Rufus greets them in the chapel with an incredulous look. “What the hell took you so long?” he blusters as he continues to direct the last few women down into the aqueduct. Lucy shakes her head to dismiss the question, hears Wyatt refer to the boy he’d saved earlier by name, which sparks a memory.

By the time she and Wyatt have convinced the boy to take the letter she’d written to General Houston, she and her teammates are the only ones left in the chapel besides Crockett and Bowie. Rufus jumps down the hole ahead of her, and she takes a moment to reach out and touch Wyatt’s cheek. “Thank you,” she says softly.

He nods. “I’ll be along in a minute,” he says, and though she hesitates, his eyes are still clear and determined and she knows he will be. She nods, and drops down into the tunnel system.

“This way to the river,” Rufus says from a few feet down. Lucy scrambles after him.

“You’re a genius, Rufus,” she says between ragged breaths.

“Well,” he says, enough humor in the tone that Lucy can tell his confidence levels in their survival have skyrocketed in the last few minutes, “it was either be a genius or die horribly, so… I went with be a genius.”

Lucy laughs. “Good choice.”

“You wanna tell me why it took you so long to get Wyatt?”

Lucy shrugs. “He’s stubborn,” she says.

“Uh-huh. Sure, if that’s what you want to go with.”

“For now, anyway.”

A moment later, Wyatt catches up with them. Their luck holds, and they are able to get all the women and children well on their way to safety as well as make their own way back to the lifeboat without meeting up with any of Santa Anna’s soldiers.

As Rufus prepares the lifeboat for the return trip, Wyatt leans across the small space between his seat and Lucy’s and reaches for her seatbelt. She waits until he’s finished buckling it, then covers his hands with hers.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, seriously.

He nods, glances toward the back of Rufus’ chair, and then presses a quick kiss to her knuckles. The contact is more electric than it has any right to be, and Lucy sucks in a surprised breath.

“Thank you,” he responds before sitting back in his own seat and doing up his own seatbelt.

“Ready?” Rufus asks a moment later.

“Yeah,” Wyatt says, gazing steadily at Lucy. “Let’s go home.”

Lucy holds Wyatt’s gaze until the lifeboat wrenches them out of the past.

=========

By tacit agreement, they don’t wait to change back into their street clothes to check the effects of their trip. Instead, dusty and tired, they trudge towards the computer bay. Rufus sits at his own computer and immediately begins searching for information about the Alamo and its aftermath. Wyatt watches carefully as Lucy half-sits, half-collapses into a chair, trying to determine if she’s hiding an injury or if she’s just tired. He drops his bag, now considerably lighter without the majority of its grenades, onto another chair and then leans against a desk.

“They made it,” Rufus says, glancing over his shoulder with a smile at Lucy and Wyatt. He turns back to the computer. “It says the men all died, but the women and children escaped.” He scrolls down a little, excitement now coloring his tone. “Inspired by an anonymously penned letter signed ‘the men and women of the Alamo,’ hundreds of volunteers had assembled in Gonzales, and it was these troops that General Sam Houston would eventually lead to victory over Santa Anna at San Jacinto.” Rufus spins a little in his chair, sends Lucy a wide smile. “Your letter got out,” he says.

“Must have been one hell of a letter,” Wyatt says quietly, confidently. Lucy’s cheeks pink up at the praise.

Ramsey’s bureaucratic briskness is an unwelcome intrusion into the fragile bubble of accomplishment the knowledge that their efforts to save the women and children, to say nothing of Texas, were successful. “I gather that Flynn is still out there,” he says.

Wyatt stiffens, but before he can reply, Lucy has straightened her spine and spoken up. “To be fair,” she says, “this time he got away by blending in with a _very large army_.”

Ignoring her, Ramsey zeroes in on Wyatt, who gets wearily to his feet. “You’re relieved of duty,” Ramsey says. “You’ll report to Pendleton for debrief and reassignment.”

Wyatt nods. “Yes, sir,” he says, trying not to sigh and refusing to look at Lucy or Rufus. He turns around and starts to pick up his things, tunes out Christopher’s comment about Bam-Bam.

Behind him, Lucy gets to her feet forcefully enough that her chair skids a little. “No,” she says firmly. Wyatt freezes. “Just hold on,” she says, and he feels her fingers brush his shoulder. He turns back to face her, and the look in her eyes has something shifting in Wyatt’s chest that feels important and dangerous. She turns her fierce gaze on Ramsey. “You can’t replace Wyatt,” she says in a tone that Wyatt is certain has put many a frat boy in his place.

Wyatt makes a half-hearted attempt to interrupt her before she gets going. “Lucy.” She flashes him a look that only a fool would choose not to heed. He gives a tiny capitulatory shrug and leans back on the desk to watch the show.

“We’re the ones risking our lives across time,” she says, gesturing at herself and Rufus. “We should get input.” Without waiting for Ramsey to indicate whether or not he is open to debate, Lucy plows ahead. “I trust Wyatt. He always makes the right choice. Every time,” she adds, emphasizing each word. “I won’t do it without Wyatt.”

“ _We_ won’t do it without Wyatt,” Rufus suddenly interrupts, getting to his feet.

Wyatt’s poker face falters. It isn’t so much that Rufus’ support means any more than Lucy’s does, it’s just that he knows there’s layers to why Lucy’s standing up for him, layers that don’t enter into his relationship with Rufus. Rufus’ support might not _mean_ more, but Wyatt realizes that he hadn’t necessarily expected it.

Rufus shakes off an attempt by Connor Mason to stop him. “Look, I know that I’m just supposed to… to shut up and cooperate.” He glances at Wyatt, back at Connor. “I can’t.” He and Lucy exchange glances, nods, and subtly shift their positions so that they are literally presenting a united front standing between Wyatt and Ramsey. “I won’t,” Rufus adds, and Wyatt feels humbled by the show of support.

“Rufus is our only pilot, sir,” Agent Christopher says to Ramsey. “Without him, there are no missions.”

There’s a tense moment of silence and Wyatt watches acceptance of being outflanked by a history teacher and a computer nerd filter over Ramsey’s slick bureaucrat face. “Can’t imagine what you’ve done to deserve this kind of devotion, Logan,” he finally says.

Lucy practically pounces on this. “So he stays?”

“It seems you’ve given us no choice,” Agent Christopher says. Her tone is solemn, but there’s a hint of a twinkle behind her eyes, and Wyatt thinks he catches one corner of her mouth almost curling upwards, as though she’s barely suppressing a smile. She turns to Ramsey. “I believe you’ll have some phone calls to make, sir,” she says, gesturing toward the stairway up to the conference room.

Ramsey gives Wyatt one last hard stare before shaking his head. “Yeah,” he mutters, and the two of them head up the stairs. Connor pulls Rufus away to confer with him in a corner somewhere, the looks on their faces making Wyatt think they must be talking about Serious Science Stuff. Lucy and Wyatt stand awkwardly for a moment; they are both alone and not alone, with no one in their immediate personal space but still standing in the busy computer bay being observed by both cameras and people.

“We should… get cleaned up,” Wyatt finally says, looking wryly at his hands, caked in dirt and dust, knowing his face is probably almost as bad.

Lucy brushes a hand uselessly over her dirt-covered dress. “Yeah.” She takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. “I heard what you said to Bowie. That’s what people are talking about when they say something to you about Syria, isn’t it?”

Wyatt nods.

“You don’t have to tell me the story again, but we still have… things to talk about.” Lucy somehow manages to look stern and understanding at the same time, and Wyatt wonders if that’s a teacher skill or a Lucy skill. He clears his throat, rubs the back of his neck.

“Yeah.” He summons a smile. “You still up for pizza at my place? I’ve got that wine you like.”

The corner of Lucy’s mouth slowly curls into a smile. “Sounds good to me,” she says. “Will you wait for me? It’s gonna take a couple rounds of shampoo to get all the dirt out of my hair, and they sent a car for me before the mission so I could use a ride anyway.”

“Of course,” he says, smiling a little. He follows Lucy away from the computer bay, splitting off from her when they reach the locker/changing rooms. By the time Wyatt has showered, changed into his street clothes, and returned his 1830s outfit to the wardrobe assistants to be cleaned and put back into their cavernous stock room, he figures he still has a bit of time to kill before Lucy will be ready to leave as well. He wonders if Bam-Bam is still around or if Christopher shuffled him out as soon as she had the chance. Wyatt heads in the direction of the conference rooms that _don’t_ overlook the landing dock, and spots Baumgartner on his way toward the exit to the public part of the building.

“Hey, Bam-Bam,” Wyatt calls out. “Hold up!”

Baumgartner stops, turns around, a grin spreading over his face as Wyatt jogs to catch up to him. “Wyatt Logan,” he says as he clasps Wyatt’s hand and pulls him into a half-hug. “The hell are you doing here?”

Wyatt grins. “They told me you were here using up our oxygen,” he says, neatly side-stepping the question.

“There I am, minding my own, in the middle of planning an op and they drag me here from Pendleton… naturally, they don’t tell me shit, that’s par for the course. Twiddle my thumbs in a boring conference room for twelve hours and now they’re sending me back to base.” He gives Wyatt a speculative look. “Don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on?”

Wyatt puts on his best innocent look. “Above my pay grade,” he says. “I just do what they tell me.”

“Well,” Baumgartner says, shifting the weight of his backpack to a more comfortable position, “if it’s big enough to get them to liberate you from desk duty things must be totally FUBAR.” There’s a moment of silence, Bam-Bam giving Wyatt a measuring look he knows all too well, having seen it on too many faces since Syria, since Jessica. “It’s good to see you,” Baumgartner finally says. “You look better. You look good.”

Wyatt nods, somewhat surprised to find it’s true. “I am better. And working on good.”

“This thing you’ve got going here gonna take much longer?” Baumgartner asks. “‘Cause if you wrap it up and they don’t chain you back to a desk, this op we’re prepping is right up your alley. I know the boys’d be happy to have you back on the team.”

“I, uh…” Wyatt thinks of the way Lucy and Rufus stood up for him earlier, thinks of the growing relationship between himself and Lucy. “I think I’ll be here a while,” he finally says, grinning. “I’ve got a new team now.”

“Fair enough,” Bam-Bam says, and with a final handshake-hug, he leaves.

Wyatt glances at his watch and wanders back towards the locker rooms. He doesn’t have to wait long before Lucy emerges, her damp hair piled in a haphazard bun, the sort of casual, utilitarian hairstyle that Wyatt has always found sexy, for reasons he fails to understand.

“Pizza and wine?” he asks.

“And conversation,” Lucy adds.

Wyatt nods. “Yeah, that too.”

They keep the conversation light until they’re settled in Wyatt’s living room, pizza and cheese bread laid out on the coffee table alongside full glasses of Lucy’s favorite wine. (Wyatt has, without even really thinking about it, kept at least one bottle of it in his apartment since Lucy mentioned liking it weeks ago, just in case. He has not chosen to examine the implications of this action.)

Lucy takes a long sip of wine and then a deep breath. “So. Obviously I heard you telling Bowie about Syria.” She takes another sip of wine. “I won’t ask you to explain it again. I wouldn’t want to put you through that.”

Wyatt smiles slightly in appreciation. “But?”

“But there’s something else going on with you,” she says, setting down her wine glass, “and I can’t help you if I don’t know what it is.”

“Okay.” Wyatt takes a deep breath and tries to decide where to start. “Jess and I… things were good in the beginning, even though only half of our words matched. I felt guilty about it, sometimes, but… I knew people who were either non-reciprocal like me and Jess or not soulmates at all but had great relationships, and my parents _were_ soulmates and their marriage was a mess.”

Lucy shrugs. “Based on something Noah said, it sounds like his Lucy didn’t have words, but they were engaged. People do it all the time.”

“Right, exactly,” Wyatt says, though his gut twists uncomfortably at the thought of a version of Lucy without his handwriting scrawled across her forearm. “Anyway, things were good at first. Even after I joined the Army, made Delta Force, for a while we were good. Did a bunch of missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, saw things that weren’t easy to forget, and I guess I started to withdraw.” He shrugs. “I didn’t want to burden Jessica with my crap, and besides, there was so much I couldn’t tell her anyway.”

“For the record,” Lucy interjects quietly, “I will always want you to burden me with your crap.” She smiles sadly. “I’m sure Jessica would’ve said the same.”

Wyatt rubs the back of his neck. “She did. And when I kept holding back, she got it into her head that it was because I was holding out for, well, you. The person who was gonna say my words. I told her that wasn’t it at all.” He looks straight into Lucy’s eyes as if he’s  hoping he can transmit the truth of his feelings via his gaze. “That was the truth. I wouldn’t have talked to you then either.”

Lucy nods. “I understand.”

“Then Syria happened,” Wyatt continues. “And that fucked me up enough that I got an official PTSD diagnosis that had me benched indefinitely from Delta Force missions, pushing papers behind a desk and going to therapy five days a week.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t have the best effect on your marriage?”

Wyatt laughs humorlessly. “Not really, no. All the problems we were having, they just got put under a microscope. And as things got worse, any time I thought about finally putting a pin in the marriage, I just thought about how unfair it was for her to get stuck having a non-reciprocal soulmate who also had more baggage than the cargo hold of a 747.”

“So you kept trying,” Lucy says. “You wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t.”

Wyatt’s cheek twitches, the ghost of half a smile he can’t quite manage to actually allow to cross his face. “I didn’t try hard enough,” he says instead. He runs his fingers through his hair. “The day she died… we had gone out for dinner, and I was…”

“Taciturn and stubborn?” Lucy suggests gently, no judgment in her tone or face.

“Yeah, that sums it up,” Wyatt affirms. “And Jess was angry, and hurt, and on the way home we were arguing in the car. We were almost home, just a few miles away. Jess used to like to walk to clear her head. At a red light, she got out of the car. Said she was gonna walk home. She liked to hike, so a few miles of paved sidewalks was nothing to her. So I just let her go.” He shakes his head. “It was ten o’clock at night, and I just drove away.”

Agitated, he pushes to his feet and begins to pace. “A few minutes later I turned around. I hoped she’d get back in the car.”

“What happened?” Lucy asks quietly.

“She was just… gone.” Wyatt shrugs helplessly. “I drove around, checked all the routes she could have taken. I waited until morning to call the cops, just in case she showed up, but I knew something was wrong. I shouldn’t have let her go.”

Lucy takes a deep breath. “I’m assuming you’ve already heard this and ignored it, but nevertheless—she was an adult who had every right to decide to get out of that car. Did you live in a bad neighborhood?”

“No,” Wyatt says, begrudgingly.

“Had she gone for walks, alone at night, before?”

“Yes,” he admits, “but I should have…”

“Should have what, Wyatt? Been psychic?” Lucy’s tone is somehow neither gentle nor harsh, just forceful enough that he listens. “I’ll tell you right now, if it were me who was angry enough at you to want to walk home, in an area I knew well, and you tried to stop me out of some masculine pride, caveman protective instinct, that would not work.”

“I was her soulmate!” Wyatt exclaims unthinkingly. “I should have protected her!”

Lucy jumps to her feet, holds out her arm, and his gaze is immediately riveted on his handwriting standing out in stark black against her pale skin. “You’re my soulmate too, Wyatt, and I’m telling you right now that the only time you get to make anything resembling a unilateral decision about my safety is when we’re on missions.” She lifts her hand to his cheek, and he lifts his eyes to hers. “And even then, I think we both know I’m willing to veto ideas I think are stupid.”

Wyatt stares into her eyes, searching them for a hint of judgment or disappointment or mistrust, finds only Lucy’s stubborn confidence. He closes his eyes, covers Lucy’s hand with his own and leans into the touch for a moment before he pulls her hand down and gestures for them both to sit back down.

“You and my Army shrink would get along,” Wyatt says ruefully.

“Your Army shrink and I are clearly both very smart,” Lucy responds with a smile.

“I’m not going to argue with your logic. I can’t just stop feeling guilty, though.”

“Of course not,” Lucy says. “But will you at least promise me that you won’t let what happened in Syria or to Jessica or literally anything else convince you that I or Rufus would be better off if you sacrificed yourself in the past?”

Wyatt manages a wry half-smile. “I promise not to sacrifice myself to save you or Rufus.” He waits a beat. “Unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Lucy narrows her eyes at him. “We’ll renegotiate that at a later date,” she says, “and until then, we’ll just make sure it’s never even an option.”

Wyatt hesitates a moment, glances at the door to his bedroom, where all his research into Jessica’s murder is. He gets to his feet, holds out his hand to Lucy. “I need to show you something.”

She puts her hand in his and lets him draw her to her feet. “Okay.”

It’s not that Wyatt feels any less guilty, or less convinced that he owes it to Jessica to find her killer and bring him to justice, but as he and Lucy go through everything he has on Jess’ murder, something flares to life in his chest that feels perilously close to hope, to the seed of a belief that he’s finally moving in the right direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to those of you who have left comments on the fic in the many months since the last update, and for keeping the fic on your radar/being willing to come back to it after so long. Life has been... a lot... for me over the last, well, year, and unfortunately fandom involvement was something that had to be sacrificed in order to be able to get things done for my graduate school/teaching responsibilities. On that note - I successfully passed my comprehensive exams in February! This summer I'll be working on my dissertation proposal, and then hopefully I'll finish the full dissertation in time to graduate with my PhD in either the Spring or Summer graduation ceremonies in 2019. Whew!
> 
> As for things in Timeless world, how INSANELY WONDERFUL was that S2 finale?! I am still reeling, and flooding my twitter feed with ~RenewTimeless~ tweets. I had some misgivings over some of the choices they made with regards to the Lyatt/Jessica/Flynn situations, largely because I _detest_ love triangle storylines, but at the end of the season I'm pretty okay with the overall arc and certainly okay with where we left Lyatt at the end of the finale! I am going to keep (trying) to work on this story/series for the foreseeable future and/or as long as people are interested in reading it, all the way through S2 and hopefully beyond, but for what I'm sure are obvious reasons I will not make any promises as to an update schedule. That being said, I'm definitely getting into part of S1 where the show really got into its groove, and I'm really looking forward to some of the opportunities the next few episodes will give me for thinking about how the soulmate aspect of the AU will change events that happened in the series (a clear example being that in the next chapter, which will cover The Watergate Tape, Wyatt already knows everything about Flynn, so the way the team dynamics rupture and repair over the course of the next couple chapters is going to be somewhat different). So with any luck the next update will not take me nearly a year to post!
> 
> Keep your fingers crossed for a S3 announcement, and please leave a comment to let me know what you thought of this chapter!


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